


Crying At All Is Not Allowed

by ChibiSquirt



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 'Noooo!' -- People who read this, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Barbershop Quartet, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamscapes, Especially as regards Bucky, F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I wrote 'Stars Fading' and then realized I wasn't quite done with the concept of a soulscape, Kinda feel dumb for forgetting that one, M/M, Multi, Platonic Soulmates, Rating May Change, Romantic Soulmates, Tags May Change, Which I haven't written yet, but I promise it's coming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-05-15 07:14:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19290838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/pseuds/ChibiSquirt
Summary: The problem with writing a story where four broken people find each other is, you have to break them first.a Barbershop Quartet Soulmate AU





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Do you ever have those days where you just need to publish _something?_ I've been having those for like, two weeks. 
> 
> This was supposed to be my Cap Big Bang last year, but life started to suck, so I dropped out. Much, much, MUCH love to DrowningByDegrees, who was my collaborator for that bang and very understanding of my withdrawal! She also read over what I had before I dropped and was very encouraging. <3333 
> 
> Pohadka and Cluegirl were the other two who read portions of this and encouraged me. I don't think anybody ever actually beta'ed it, and I'm in that six a.m. space where I'm not going to wait for a beta before publishing _we die like men_ style, but they _were_ quite supportive regardless. (It should be pretty clean copy, as a result of having had a fallow year before I came back to it, but if you do see an error, please let me know.)
> 
> I marked this fic "chose not to use warnings" because, while most of the really nasty stuff happens in dream sequences, it's still got emotional impact. It's mostly body horror and betrayals; there's no dub- or non-con, for example. I would say, if you're worried about something triggery, please feel free to drop a comment, or message me on tumblr (I'm chibisquirt there, too).

* * *

BUCKY

* * *

 

 When he was a boy, Bucky had a castle.  He always thought that was pretty swell; Maddie Long at school had a library, and Billy O’Rourke had a church, but nobody else had a castle.  Bucky felt... special.

It wasn't a real castle, of course.  A real castle for a kid from Brooklyn?  What a joke! No, the castle was Bucky's soulscape, that dreamworld where he would meet his soulmate, if he had one.  

Not everybody did.  Bucky had even heard that some people didn't have soulscapes at all, and he wondered if that was worse.  

He spent a lot of time thinking about it, more than he really should have.  His best friend Steve's soulscape was empty, too.  Steve loved his soulscape, loved it as much as Bucky loved his castle, although he wouldn't tell Bucky where it was.  He did say it was beautiful, though. "God, Buck.  It's _so_  beautiful.  I could stay there the rest of my life, and if no one shows up, I'll still be just fine."

Steve's soulmate hadn't shown up, either, so he was in the same boat as Bucky.  Bucky was eight, though, while Steve was ten; if Steve's soulmate hadn't shown by now it was getting to be less likely that he had one.  

Steve didn't really seem to mind that.  He looked maybe a little sad when Bucky mentioned it, but then brushed it off and went about his day.

 

* * *

 

Three years later, Bucky was eleven, and Steve was thirteen and dying.  He was in bed with pneumonia, weak and tired, coughing up these dry, wracking coughs that looked and sounded painful and produced nothing.  His eyes were red from sleeplessness, and the book Bucky had brought him— The Jungle— lay listlessly on top of the blanket.  Steve had said he couldn't focus enough to read it.

"Probably good," he said now.  His voice was raspy with coughing and quiet.  His gaze skittered away from Bucky's, focusing in on the wall across the room.  That meant he wasn't focusing on anything; Steve was too nearsighted to make out the junebug crawling slowly towards the ceiling.  

"What's good?"  Bucky poked at the soup he had brought with a spoon.  The soup was probably not what Steve was talking about.  Bucky's ma tried real hard, but this wasn't her gift.

"That I'm alone—"  Steve was interrupted halfway through the thought by another round of coughing.

Bucky didn't wait for it to subside.  "You're not alone," he answered hotly.  "I'm right here!"

When Steve's fit had passed, he sank back against the pillows Sarah had managed to get.  Bucky wasn't sure when she had done it; it seemed strange to think of stockpiling against a sickbed, but Steve had been ill before.  Maybe that was what she had done.

"Didn't mean that."  Steve opened his mouth and placidly accepted some of the terrible soup.  He made a complicated face, but swallowed it easily enough. "Meant the soulscape.  Soulmate.  That."  One hand waved idly off the blanket, then sank back down as if exhausted by the gesture.  "That kind of alone.  Didn't mean you— never you."  He gave Bucky a beaming smile, like the sun slipping from behind a cloud, and groped around until Bucky gave him his hand to hold.

Bucky felt like his heart was breaking.  Steve was always so unbothered about not having a soulmate; had he known this was coming?  Did he always just figure he would die before meeting her?

"You'll meet her," Bucky said stubbornly.  "You will."

Steve's face closed off.  "Kinda doubt that, Buck."  He turned his head away and started coughing again, those horrible, dry coughs that made Bucky's throat ache in sympathy.  When he turned back, he had pasted on a smile. "And what about you, huh? You got a soulmate in that scape of yours?"

Bucky didn't.  He kind of figured he wasn't good enough for a soulmate; five years of being friends with Steve Rogers, it was obvious that there were some standards he was just never going to meet.  Steve had a rigid moral code, a righteousness about him that burned like a bonfire, wide as a street and high as the sky, even though Steve himself was the size of a toothpick and Bucky, two years younger, was already bigger than he was.  Steve had a core of truth inside of him that Bucky just couldn't match.

Bucky knew what he was:  a streetwise, fighty kind of punk, running errands for the mafia and lightfingered when he felt like it.  He knew what he was; it was okay.  Steve was willing to be friends, anyway, and Bucky had always been grateful for that.  

But if Steve wasn't good enough to have a soulmate, then Bucky definitely wasn't.  That was just a fact.

Bucky squeezed Steve’s hand and pasted on a smile.  “Maybe she’s just a lot younger than me, huh?”

 

* * *

 

By the time he went to war, Bucky knew he would always be alone.  No way he was going to get a soulmate _twenty-one years_ younger than he was.  That was okay; most folks didn’t get a soulmate, anyway.  You got the soulscape and you thought, “Maybe...” and then no one else showed up and you just accepted that it wasn’t going to be you.  That was the common experience, right there.  And Bucky had known for over a decade, now, so it wasn’t like a shock or anything.

He had a family—three sisters, and his folks were still alive, too—and he had Steve, the best guy Bucky could ever know.  And there were plenty of girls out there who didn’t have soulmates, either.  He went dancing often enough.

At night, though... in his dreams...

Bucky wandered through his castle, sometimes.  He walked the halls, opened the doors.  Bucky’s soulscape had a ballroom.  He’d dance in there, too, sometimes, whirling around in circles, arms spread wide, around and around until the room spun around him, hoping that his soulmate would slip through the door and catch him if he started to fall.  He didn’t do it often; it was very gothic, for one thing, and the castle was gothic enough on its own that Bucky always felt he had to watch out for that.  It was almost... morbid, in a way.  He didn’t like to dwell on it.

But sometimes, you just had to dance.  Sometimes a guy needed to set the world spinning, if only to see what would still be there when it once again came still.

 

* * *

 

Bucky followed Steve to Hell and back, trying to take down HYDRA.  It was worth it, for what they had done to him; worth it, too, for what they had done to Steve, although that was subtler.  Quieter.

Steve had always had a righteous fire, but now it was directed.  Bucky would never forgive HYDRA for that.

They were close to done when Bucky fell; that was always the worst part of it.  They had had two, at most four missions left when Bucky blew out the damn side of the train.  He held on for dear life, and he almost made it, too.  Steve was reaching out to him, and it wouldn’t have taken Steve long to haul Bucky back inside if they could only have clasped hands.

But the bar Bucky was clutching broke under the strain, and Bucky fell, instead.  The world spun around him as he reached out for something, anything, to slow his fall, but there was nothing, and more nothing, and then—

 

* * *

 

Bucky had always known you needed a certain kind of sleep to see your soulscape.  It had to be deep sleep, the kind you dream in, and then there were some other factors, too.  

Yeah, HYDRA weren’t gonna let him see his soulscape again any time soon.

 

* * *

 

They broke him.  

They held him, tortured him, told him terrible things...  They even proved some of them were true.  The damned news clippings about Steve, for one—those were the worst.  There were hundreds of them, from all different newspapers.  Way too many for them to have made up.

Bucky cried, that night.  They threw him back in his cell and walked away laughing, and Bucky put his head on his knees and wrapped his remaining arm around them and _sobbed._

The thing was, he would never have been able to go back to his family.  The world he was in now was too dark, too awful, to inflict upon his baby sisters.  Bucky had known that all along.  But that had been alright: Bucky could’ve gone to Steve, instead.  Steve had a righteous fire; he would have been able to bear it.  Bucky could have screamed at Steve, he could have shouted, could have sobbed, and Steve would have just taken it, weathered it the way he had everything else in his miserable life.  Steve was too bright for Bucky to ever tarnish.

But now Steve was gone, and even if Bucky escaped, there was nowhere left now he could go.

They let him cry himself to sleep, that night, for once not turning up the lights when the sun set, for once not blaring noises into his cell every time he nodded off.  He slipped into his soulscape like a drowning man slipping beneath the waves, and just like that, it was the death of him.

Bucky’s soulscape was a castle, and now he was locked in the dungeon.

He panicked first thing.  He beat on the cell door, shouting for somebody, _anybody_ to hear him—but of course, there wasn’t anybody.  Bucky didn’t have a soulmate.  He was alone.

Then he tried wrenching at the bars, tried to find something to break them with.  There was nothing—and halfway through trying to pull the bar from the wall, his shoulder screamed at him and, in the dream, his whole damn arm fell off.  Bucky screamed again: he had forgotten he wasn’t whole, anymore, but by god, the dream was going to remind him.

“No—no, no, no— _NO!”_

He stared at the arm on the ground and, like an idiot, picked it up and frantically tried to put it back on, scraping the shoulder end against the raw flesh of the joint over and over, hoping it would click back into place like magnets.  But it did no good; the shoulder didn’t magically reattach.

With a frustrated yell, Bucky slammed the detached arm against the bars of his dungeon cell.  He felt the impact up his palm, making his remaining forearm ache, and it wasn’t helping, it wasn’t helping at all, but he couldn’t _stop,_ now.  He slammed the limb against the cage bars over and over again, until the bone had shattered in to hundreds of pieces, and his own hand had been reduced to pulp.

 

* * *

 

The Soldier thought it was funny that he had a soulscape.  What use was that, to him? No one could love him.

He didn’t see it often.  Mostly he was in cryo, the world outside the tank crystallizing as he froze into rods and spikes like a Picasso because the juices in his eyeballs were always the first things to solidify.  God, he hated it! Hated the way he was blind for a while after, hated the way his bones would ache for the next few days.  But he also hated the way he started to crave it, wanting the nothingness of it.  He ached for it after just a week or so of being awake.

So he never saw his soulscape while he was in cryo.  When he was out of the ice—when he had a mission—he still didn’t see his scape much, because mostly, his handlers didn’t let him sleep.  Mostly he didn’t need to; the ice would take care of him once he made it back.  From time to time, though, he would have a mission that ran longer, long enough for him to need a few nights of deep slumber.  Surveillance in Vietnam, a series of assassinations in the USSR...  On those missions he got to see his soulscape.

A little of it, anyway.  

It seemed obvious from the echoes and movements of the air that the space was more expansive than the small corner of it he inhabited, but the Soldier had no hope of exploring:  he always entered the soulscape locked into a cell.  The room was archaic, a dungeon as much as anything, with iron bars sealing him in.  The only other items in the cell were a sleeping pad and two bucket for rest and relief—not that he needed the buckets, since it was only a dream.  He used the cot, though, folding the thin mattress of it over until it was thick enough to sit on.  He rested there, knees curled under him, head resting against the cool, stone bricks of the wall.

It seemed kind of ironic to the Soldier, in a dark sort of way, that his soulscape was a cage, just as much as the rest of his life.  

Funny, really.

 

* * *

 

It got a lot less funny when he met his soulmate.

The mission was in Bulgaria, a series of subtle sabotages that would topple a regime.  He had seen his soulscape twice so far, and by the third night, he was almost grateful for it.  It was comforting, the close catch of the cage around him, the knowledge that, even if it was pathetic, there was still another life to him, another plain of his existence.  One that was as terrible as the physical plain, but still.

He wondered, as he sat in cell picking at the thin blanket spread on the floor like a bed, whether he had ever seen the rest of the scape.  There was a hallway beyond his cell; there was a door at the end, he could see it when he pressed his face to the bars.  Surely there was more to this scape than just the dungeon.  Had he known that, back when he was a person? Had he ever explored, before he was the Soldier?

No way to tell now, of course.  It wasn’t like he could remember, and who else would ever have known?

And then he heard them.

Footsteps.

The steps were light; the feet making them were likely trained to move quietly, although they were imperfect, yet.  They were neither fast nor slow, the pace of someone who already knows there isn’t anybody around and who is exploring at their own whim.

They were on the stairs.

The Soldier tensed, freezing in place.  He barely breathed as the footsteps moved closer, as the door at the end of the dungeon creaked open on hinges the Soldier had never seen move.  The footsteps entered, more slowly, now.  If the Soldier were to press his head against the bars, he would be able to see the person.  The _soulmate,_ he corrected himself.  It began to sink in, slowly at first, the way the first wash of summer rain can’t really penetrate the hard-packed dirt:  the Soldier had a soulmate.

How?  And who?  Who would ever be able to love _him?_

A girl, it turned out.  She moved lightly but confidently through the dungeon, glancing into the cells, her red hair swinging loose about her face with the movement.  She was young, maybe eight years old; this was not her first visit to the soulscape, the Soldier judged, but it was hardly old hat for her.  She wasn’t blase.  Her frame was short and firmly muscled like a gymnast; she moved like a dancer, but wasn’t one.  The Soldier wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he was very, very certain:  this was an assassin.  A baby assassin, who had maybe not taken many lives, but still.

Dangerous.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because she was his soulmate, and she had to love him.  That was how it worked, and impossible as it seemed, sick and wretched as he was, she was his match.  He knew it.

And it _also_ didn’t matter because she was his only way out.

He cleared his throat.  Speech was uncomfortable, these days.  He could do it, but the hesitation was always there.  

The girl whirled at the sound, a weapon drawn from nowhere pointed at his face in the time between the clearing of his throat and the finding of words.  A gun, he noticed; Russian make, snub nose—she would lose some accuracy, but then, at this range she would hardly need it.  He instinctively moved his arm forward to block but stopped before he had moved more than a couple inches.  No need to scare her—but her eyes had already found the prosthetic, noted it, dismissed it.

It made the words easier, somehow.  “Will you let me out?” he asked.  He spoke in Russian, to match her choice of weapon.  He couldn’t remember ever learning Russian, but he knew the tongue, along with half a dozen more, some of them rustier than others.  English was always the first one that came to mind, but he couldn’t ever remember any missions in England or America.  And no one ever had missions in Canada.  

The girl didn’t answer him.  Her gun didn’t move.  Her posture _did_ move, a bit:  her stance firmed, her hands around the stock of the gun more sure.

“Will you let me out—please,” the Soldier repeated.  “I mean you no harm.  Surely you are my soulmate!”

“Soulmate,” the girl repeated.  Her tone was stunned, wondering.  “Soulmate.”  She sounded the word out as if she had never heard it before, each syllable falling distinctly out of her mouth.  

Her accent was native, her voice low.  Far less soprano than one would expect from a little girl.  When she was grown, her voice would be husky, a beautiful instrument.  The Soldier found himself looking forward to it, looking forward to learning this amazing girl as she became a woman.  What manner of woman could ever love him? He could never have a soulmate—and yet, here she was.

She was a miracle.  “My god,” he swore, marveling at it.  “I could never hurt you.”

Her face... changed.  The gun dropped away, pointing limply at the ground.  She stared at him for a long moment, the seconds dragging out to minutes, then shook her head.  A wondering laugh tumbled from her perfect, childish lips.

“You?” she asked.  She stepped closer to the cell, putting the gun away as she moved.  “You’re my soulmate?”

She was close enough to touch, now, although the Soldier didn’t.  He looked at her, hungrily memorizing the bones of her face, the curve of her lips.  He traced his eyes over the arch of her brows and the sly obscurity of her eyes.  They were green, rounded by youth.  They were lovely.  “I’m your soulmate,” he promised.  “And you...  What is your name?”

She blinked, once.  “Natasha,” she told him.  “You can call me Natasha.”  Her eyes mirrored his, wide, wondering.  “And you?”

The Soldier opened his mouth, then froze, devastated.  “I don’t have one,” he said.  “My god.  I’m so sorry.  I really don’t.  They took it.”

Natasha stepped even closer, and he went to his knees beside the bars.  He pressed closer, the metal digging into his skin, so that she could see him.  “Please,” he said.  “Please, Natasha; will you let me out?”

Natasha closed with him, brushing a kiss over his forehead like a benediction before drawing back.  He knew what she was going to say before she said it, but it still struck him a hard blow, a knife stuck deep in his heart:  “No,” she said, “I won’t.”

She turned and ran towards the door, her footsteps light and almost silent.  Before leaving she hesitated, turning back once.  Her eyes were green and fathomless as she added, “I’m sorry,” before finally fleeing the dungeon.

The Soldier slumped, defeated, against the bars of his cell.

He woke in despair.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll update one chapter every Sunday until the end on this.

NATASHA

* * *

 

 

Natalia Alianova Romanova was her name, but she never told anybody that. 

When she was a girl, her teachers had strictly forbidden it. Her innocence, they told her, was her weapon; her youth, her camouflage. "Use the diminutive,” they told her, “it will trick the men you ensnare into underestimating you.” And it had worked: Natalia was a woman grown, but Natasha was always going to be a girl, and men took it easy on girls. Usually right up until she shot them. Or stabbed them. Or used the garrotte. Or her thighs. Or, on one glorious occasion, two point three tons of explosives.

When she was a child, of course, she was always Natasha, both because everybody she knew was with the Red Room and because, at that age, everyone went by the diminutive: she would have used it anyway. But as she grew older, she remained Natasha still. 

Eventually she came to wonder about the wisdom of that. "It will fool your enemies,” her teachers had said. But the truth was that if she repeated it enough, it would fool her, too.

 

* * *

 

She could still remember meeting her soulmate, for all it had only happened once, and in a dream, at that. He had looked wild and desperate, locked into the dungeon of the fanciful castle in which she had found herself night after night.

At first that had been lovely. She had curtsied to the suits of armor and stuck her head out on the balcony... Using it for tactical infiltration practice, she had mapped every room, including the doors that were locked to her: three on the ground floor, one on the second, and five more spread out over the top two floors which all—she suspected—led to the crenellated battlements she had seen from the balcony. There were gardens, too; extensive ones, a whole system of them stretching away behind the castle, with orchards beyond that. She could see the gardens from the arrow slits in the rear wall, but had been unable to find a door that would open for her that led in their direction.

The last place she checked had been a small, barred door at the rear of the guard’s tower. It opened to reveal a steep, twisting staircase heading down, unlit by any of the airslits found in the rest of the castle  _ or _ the dingy electric lights she had spotted in the interior rooms. She made her way silently down the stairs—uneven, she noted, like the ones near the battlements. Designed to throw invaders off their game. She had to step carefully as she made her way down the spiral of them into the darkness. 

She had almost expected the dungeons by the time she got there, too aware of the atmosphere not to know what she would find. 

She could never have predicted the prisoner, though.

She thought the room was empty when she entered it, didn’t practice proper clearing as a result. She would love to say she hadn’t glanced at his cell until he spoke, but the truth was, she  _ had.  _ She had looked, and he had been so still, so stationary, that she had looked right over him and not realized that he was a person.

If this were real life, the mistake would have been deadly. As it was, he was her soulmate, and—apparently—incapable of hurting her.

Or so he said, anyway. But then, a lot of people had told Natalia that they wouldn’t hurt her, and some of them had lied. Even some of the ones she had  _ believed  _ had been lying.

He asked her her name, and she told him to call her Natasha. He would have done so in any case, she reminded herself. She was too young for Natalia. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t really know who she was.

That was a lie. She spotted it the same way she always knew when people were lying to her. 

“Please,” he begged, his voice accented with an English tinge, too faint a thing for her to pinpoint a country. "Please. Let me out.”

Natasha had been young and foolish, but not  _ that  _ foolish. If the Red Room found out she had a soulmate, she would die; she knew that without having to ask, and she had no quarrel with the knowledge. There was no room in this work for those blinded by sentimentality. She had a duty to her country to fulfill. And why was he locked into the cell in the first place? Why had her mind decided that, of all the ways her soulmate could appear,  _ imprisoned  _ was the best one for him?

Or maybe she was even more foolish than she could possibly have believed; no way to be sure, really. Regardless, she left him in the cell.

It continued to eat at her, after that. She kept coming back to it. "You can call me Natasha.” Did that mean she distrusted him? But he was her soulmate! On the other hand, she  _ had  _ left him in the cell; maybe she really  _ did  _ distrust him. Or perhaps it was habit—but she remembered the deliberate heaviness of the syllables against her tongue, and immediately discarded that idea. 

The possibility that truly filled her with horror, though, was this: maybe she  _ couldn’t  _ be Natalia anymore. As years passed—as she flowered from childhood to girlhood to womanhood, and then was frozen into place forever with her “graduation ceremony”—she wondered more and more if it was true: there was no more Natalia. Natasha was the only one left.

 

* * *

 

She broke free from all players in 2001, running hard and fast for freedom, burning her former handlers and falsifying her own records until no memory of her true history remained. She used every trick she knew to find a place to lay low, finally finding one in a place where it was too cold, both atmospherically and emotionally, for anyone to come investigate the thin stream of smoke that emerged from her chimney. She lived on canned fish and beans in a safehouse in the most rural part of Vermont for six months, and only when the snow had melted and all her firewood had been exhausted did she creep out to check her traps.

There was a dead drop in Sao Paulo where she had frequently been seen; it was long gone, destroyed in an explosion back in October that the authorities had declared a fault in the gas lines. There was a Yakuza head in Japan who had owed her a favor; over fifteen different agencies had sent agents to his house to look for her. She hadn’t been there, of course—and the agents, with few exceptions, had not made it back out again. 

The Israeli entrepreneur she had briefly romanced on that one mission in ‘99 had been found dead in his swanky penthouse. The CIA handler she had partnered with temporarily on the Pakistani job was found hanging in a meat warehouse in Baltimore. And the Duke of Hanover’s daughter—young, but already playing men like her only alternative was to study Latin—she was never found at all, although Natasha privately thought that one might go either way; the girl had been ready to fly free. 

Everyone who had ever been her ally was gone. That was fine, she told herself; her allies had never been the most reliable, anyway.

That night she broke into the Hyatt in Indianapolis, conning the concierge until she was registered for a suite on the thirty-eighth floor. It wasn’t the penthouse, but it would do. The tub was large and the water hot; the hotel provided scented soaps which she gleefully dunked into the water. When it was sudsy and hot, the scents of verbena and basil rising to her nostrils, she stepped into the water and lay back, relaxing against the rim of the tub.

...There  _ was  _ one more potential ally, she remembered. One more person she could call on, who no one could have associated her with. Of course no one had known; she had never told anyone about her soulmate. The one-armed prisoner with the haunted blue eyes... What if he really  _ was  _ a prisoner, somewhere? She could break him out, because who would stop her, and then they could watch each other’s backs. The presence of a soulmate alone would be a pretty good cover. 

She didn’t know him. She didn’t know anything about him—not even his name, she remembered. He had said he didn’t have one. Obviously that was nonsense—everyone had a name. She herself had several. The hotel, for example, thought she was Allison Luudkvist. 

She had introduced herself to him as Natasha. She still regretted that.

In the end, she decided not to actually  _ go  _ to him. She didn’t know him, didn’t know where he was... There was no guarantee that he would be able to help her at all. And getting someone already in danger involved in her situation was just asking for trouble. No, she couldn’t ask her soulmate for help. 

She could maybe help  _ him, _ though. Let him out of the dungeon, at least. That much she was free to do, for once.

She went to bed that night only once she was truly, deeply relaxed from the tub. There was no chance of anyone finding her here, but she had ringed the room with traps and alarms anyway. No sense in taking chances. She dressed for the night in a simple t-shirt and panties, because that was what she had. She wasn’t going to go shopping for lingerie at this hour, not after everything she had done to ensure she could reach her soulscape. Instead, she just climbed into bed in her loose shirt and underwear, pulling the covers up to her chin and letting her hands rest, palm up, open, on top of the coverlet. 

She closed her eyes and began to measure her breathing, smoothing out the nervous hitches of her breath.

What if he hated her, now? What if he  _ despised  _ her? She had slammed the door on him as a child, and that was a wound it would be hard to heal from...

She opened her eyes in the ballroom, which was where she always entered the castle. 

She set off in a sprint, pumping her arms and running at a pace that would have been exhausting in real life. She tore through the hallways, flinging herself towards the guard tower where the spiral staircase was found. Her breath burned in her throat, even in the dream, and her hair kept catching in the corners of her open, panting mouth. 

Her eyes stung, and it was only when she swiped at them that she realized they were tearing up. 

Was she that scared, then? Ultimately, it was just a dream. Surely she had no true connection to the prisoner. She had only met him once, and then briefly. It couldn’t  _ really  _ hurt her if he hated her, could it? That was only for people who still had hearts. It had been years since Natasha had carved out hers.

The staircase downward was just as dark, just as grim as she remembered, the door at the bottom still solid and largely metal—some sort of steel, she thought. The air was cool and damp, so that she shivered as she reached for the latch.

It was locked.

At first she didn’t believe it.  _ Couldn’t  _ believe it. She pounded on it and pounded, but no answer came from the other side. She rattled at the latch over and over again, but it always caught and never gave. 

It was locked tight, and her soulmate—or the man who  _ would  _ have been her soulmate, if she hadn’t rejected him—was still in a cage, abandoned on the other side. 

Her hair was catching, strands of red sticking to the moisture on her face. She tasted metal. It could have been the atmosphere, humid and surrounded by stone, but she knew it wasn’t. It  _ wasn’t. _

She woke in a panic, crying freely, the last echoes of her own voice screaming “NO!” echoing in her ears. The hotel room was hardly soundproofed; she instantly swung her legs out of bed and reached for her clothes, her bag. Best to get out quickly.

She caught a cab to the airport, stole a boarding pass and a wallet from a woman who looked vaguely like herself. Repeated it five more times in five more airports until she was in Budapest, sipping tea from a proper samovar. 

By then she had a plan, an actual plan. It involved finding a deal she could stomach, which, admittedly, could be a complicated maneuver on its own: the Black Widow had a certain reputation, greater now that she had turned on her own handlers. Once she had amnesty somewhere—hopefully working for an agency whose goals she would want to aid—then...

But maybe her plan would have to wait. There was a blond man across the road, staring at her. American, she would bet anything, and—

He didn’t break eye contact, crossing the street as he came towards her—she dropped her hand to her weapon—

A truck bearing a loudly lowing cargo of milk-cows barreled into him, tossing him in the air to land with a crunch of breaking bones, rolling him to a stop at her feet. 

He groaned and opened his eyes, pain darkening them so that, even at this distance, she couldn’t tell what color the irises were. He looked up at her and, if possible, winced even further.

“Okay,” he groaned, “this looks bad.”

Natasha let her hands fall from her gun and knife. For once, she had absolutely no control over what her face was doing.

 

* * *

 

The man was an agent of SHIELD, codename: Hawkeye. Alias: Clint, according to the man who debriefed Natasha. Alias: that fucking  _ idiot,  _ according to the woman who came in after the man. And alias: meal-ticket, as far as Natasha was concerned. SHIELD was probably the best outfit she could find for her particular purposes, although they had some difficulty believing that Natasha really wanted to come work for them. 

Hawkeye, whom she spent five days holed up with while she held him for what was, essentially, ransom, seemed to have a good heart. After half a week, he managed to persuade his handler—the man who called him Clint—that he had successfully persuaded Natasha to switch sides, and while Natasha side-eyed him, she was willing to let him have the victory.

The sense of accomplishment might help his bones to heal, the little moron.

 

* * *

 

Hawkeye—Clint—got out of traction at the same time that SHIELD finally decided that Natasha could be entrusted with a mission. Naturally the two of them were paired together. Natasha got the sense that it was punishment detail for Clint, but couldn’t bring herself to take it too personally. He managed to get  _ hit by a truck  _ on his last mission, for fuck’s sake! If  _ anyone  _ deserved to get paired with the potential traitor...

But she found, much to her frustration, that she couldn’t  _ just  _ be a teammate to Clint. He was an open and generous soul—although less open than he purported to be—and he drew confessions out of her like he drew back his bow: competently, and often without going on to fire. 

It was bewildering—and embarrassing. He showed up at her office with cookies and she told him of her love of hamantashen; he tried to adopt a dog, and she told him about the time she killed the ambassador of Sokovia with a parrot. They went undercover to an art gallery and she exclaimed over a painting of a poppy: she loved the bright orange color, loved the vibrant way it refused to succumb no matter the darkness around it. At least that one she could play off as being something her cover would have said, not her.

The most upsetting secret came out nearly six months after the beginning of their partnership. She had long since been assigned an office: a mere cubicle, but it was her own, and separated from Clint by enough distance that she wouldn’t be subjected to the awful music he played too-loud on what was definitely not a SHIELD-approved headset. On this particular day, she arrived at work, walked in—

—she actually  _ drew her gun  _ before she identified the unfamiliar motion in her space as a streamer of crepe paper. She lowered her weapon and turned flat eyes on her intruder.

“What,” she asked flatly, “is this?” 

Clint was sprawled behind her desk, arms crossed behind his head and feet propped on her blotter, but his eyes were wide at having seen her draw the gun. "Happy birthday?” he tried. He nudged a box next to his feet—cream colored with thin gold ribbon wrapping around it—in her direction. "I brought you cupcakes.”

Natasha blew air out threw her lips and holstered her gun. "What kind of cupcakes?”

There were a dozen: two carrot cake (one each with and without nuts), one red velvet, two double chocolate, one rum spice, three made of brownie batter instead of cake, and three with cream cheese filling. Natasha picked one up at random and bit, shoving it into her mouth like a squirrel with icing caking off around her lips. She shoved Clint’s feet off her desk and scowled at him. "Ish thish a prank?!”

He scowled back at her. "What? No! It’s actually your birthday! Geeze, did you forget?!”

She  _ had, _ she realized. Her false birthday, the one she had made up when she changed the year of birth from 1948 to 1984:  _ that  _ was today. She sat down on the desk, chewed and swallowed until she could get words out. Her eyes stung, and she blinked to clear them. 

“Holy shit, you really did! Aww, Nat, no!”

Clint always called her that: Nat, not Natasha. 

She looked up at him, uncaring of the smear of off-white icing on her cheek. Her eyes felt wide. "We weren’t really sentimental about them in Russia,” she meant to tell him—she could even hear the faint hint of an accent she would have put on it, it wasn’t even  _ untrue— _ but what came out instead was, “My file is a lie.” 

Clint’s face got serious. He sat up in her chair and leaned forward, either not noticing or not caring when he put his elbow in one of the carrot cakes. "Your file? What part?” 

Natasha shrugged one shoulder, not looking at him. "Most of it.” 

Clint watched her serious, then picked up another cupcake and shoved it in his mouth, not saying anything. He held up the remaining carrot cupcake for her and she took it, smiling sadly.

The next year he threw her another party. This one was louder, more ostentatious. There were far more people there than she was comfortable with, and even more balloons than people. There was a pinata shaped like Nick Fury that was worth every bit of the trouble it caused, filled with airplane bottles of liquor as well as hordes of cheap candy and poppers. A month later she was  _ still  _ finding glitter from those.

It clung like trust.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh I love Natasha POV.

In 2009, she was assigned to escort an engineer out of Iran. It stung a bit; this was the sort of mission you really didn’t need the Black Widow for, and both she and Coulson knew it. "He’s skittish,” Coulson explained with a twist of his lips. "Fury wants to reassure him that we’re serious about protecting him, because he really, truly  _ believes  _ that someone is going to try to kill him.”

“So why is Fury sending a woman?” Natasha asked. Her own lips were twisting, too. She let them; it was just Coulson. 

“Even in Iran, they’ve heard of the Black Widow,” he answered her dryly. "They asked for Clint, but I honestly think he’d stand out  _ more.  _ Fury agreed to send you instead.”

Natasha thought about that a lot in the days and weeks ahead. She thought about it especially as the tires blew, as she was laying on top of the engineer she had thrown free of the car, as his terrified babbling abruptly ceased and she realized he wasn’t the only one who had been shot. 

Mission objective failure. 

Secondary objective? 

Survival. 

She threw herself to the side to avoid the double-tap—it whistled past her ear—and looked for the shooter. The least she could do was bring him down with her.

He wasn’t across the gorge, which was where she initially looked for him. If you wanted to shoot a car coming up the road, the only place—the only angle that would suffice for any but the most expert of shooters—would be across the gorge. But he wasn’t across the gorge, which was bad news, because to make _that_ shot, at  _that angle—_

He was on a ledge, instead, a mere twenty yards away, straight up. Her stomach rolled over sickly. His mask was lowered around his throat as he frowned down at her. He was close; he was  _ so  _ close. She could see his face, see the puzzled frown—something like recognition—sitting on his too-familiar features. 

Sunlight glinted off of his left shoulder. 

Her stomach clenched again painfully, muscles spasming around the wound. He lifted his gun slowly, preparing to take a second shot at her—he had to, he  _ obviously  _ had to, of course he did—and she rolled again, left this time, bumping and squishing over the lifeless body of Ahmed Marjean as she dove for the cliff face. 

Maybe he would think she was dead. For now, at least; he would obviously learn better sooner or later. But for now, he would think she was dead, thrown to the ground far below, when instead she was still holding on, literally and figuratively. She clung to the underside of the cliff and prayed, waiting for her too-slow backup as her stomach dripped blood and her grip slowly, slowly weakened.

 

* * *

 

Clint came and visited her in the hospital. He brought her flowers, a small-caliber handgun, shortbread, and a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, and when the KGB sent three mediocre agents to assassinate her he arrested them all and turned them over to SHIELD. 

It was sweet.

She slept poorly for most of a week, but the night before she was discharged she finally managed to dream herself into her soulscape. She opened her eyes in the ballroom, of course. She always did. 

There was no reason to go exploring, she told herself. Nothing would change, nothing would be fixed, by poking her nose into the corners of her soulscape. That had always been true of her soulmate. 

The thought was bitter, and here in her dreams she let her mouth twist with it. She put her hair up in a bun, let her stride lengthen for comfort. There was no one here to impress.

She turned towards the guard tower anyway, even knowing how pointless it was. There was a part of her that still hoped she would be wrong, that the door would be open, that she would fly down the stairs and find her soulmate at the bottom, waiting for her with remorse in his pale blue eyes, the fearsome metal arm gone still. A shameful, weak part of her, she would have called it once, but now she wondered if that was true.

It didn’t matter. The door was locked, as it always was these days.  

 

* * *

 

When she was discharged, Clint picked her up in a QuinJet, carefully watching her buckle herself into the seat to make sure she did it right. She rolled her eyes at him and put on a light voice. "I’m an invalid, not a child, Clint.”

Clint just nodded and took off.

“So, I know you’re benched,” he started when they were in the air.

“I’m not doing your paperwork for you.”

“Awww, Nat!” But it wasn’t what he had been going to say, apparently, because after a second he cleared his throat and shifted in the pilot seat. "You need a place to stay.”

“I have an apartment.”

“You have an apartment that’s up three flights of stairs, which you’re not going to manage with a giant-ass hole in your gut, and also you’re not going back there because someone told a sniper where to find you and your target and it’s going to be another six months before you trust  _ anybody.” _

Natasha looked out the window at the sea of fluffy clouds passing beneath them. "Everybody who knew my route had access to Marjean’s food. They could have poisoned him any time, so why call in the Winter Soldier?”

Clint jumped, a flailing arm smacking into the dash. "They sent  _ what?!”  _

“Wouldn’t he be a  _ who?” _

“I mean,  _ probably _ , but I don’t  _ care  _ because  _ holy shit, Nat!”  _

Natasha shrugged, not looking away from the window. "He had a metal arm. Good aim—good like yours. No one knew he was there.” Her voice was carefully nonchalant. "Who else would it be?”

“Wow.” Clint flew the plane in silence for a second, then added thoughtfully, “And the guy’s a fucking unicorn, so even if you survived their assassination attempt, no one would ever believe you.”

Nat’s hand clenched in her lap, but her voice still came out mostly even. "But you believe me?”

Clint shrugged. "Sure. Makes sense anyway. You’re right about Marjean’s food supply being the easier way to go. And besides, you’re a higher-priority target than Marjean was. Of  _ course  _ it was actually a hit on you.”

Nat’s other hand was clenched in her lap, too. That wasn’t what she had been thinking, but now that Clint said it—in the same normal, level, isn’t-it-obvious tone he used for all of his game-changing revelations—it was impossible to deny the truth of it. She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. "And  _ him?  _ You believe me about him?”

It shouldn’t matter. So what if Clint didn’t believe that the Winter Soldier had taken a hit on her—and then botched the job? It was ridiculous.  _ She  _ wouldn’t believe her, either.

But Clint wasn’t her, and his trust  _ did  _ matter, actually. Damn it all.

He shrugged again. "It’s a tough shot with a rifle, and to throw the car he’d’ve had to’ve used some pretty heavy ordinance... makes sense it was a—what did Coulson call them? ‘Enhanced individual?’ But you don’t know it was him any more than I do. At that distance, it could’ve just been a guy in a funny jacket.”

“It was him.” Natasha remembered the glint of the arm, remembered the cold spike that had gone through her gut even before the punch of the bullet: the certainty.  _ I’ve seen that arm,  _ she remembered thinking,  _ I saw it when I was a little girl.  _ Dark hair, longer now, had ruffled and swung in the mountain wind. It was too far away to see his eyes, but she would never forget their color. 

How had she never put it together? But then, she had always thought of him as _ the prisoner _ —because the word  _ soulmate  _ was dangerous—and who could ever imagine the Winter Soldier as a prisoner?

The Winter Soldier, who had killed three of her earliest trainers, who had a reputation even more dangerous than her own. Who was a fine enough sniper for the Tallinn Massacre job, and who, rumor had it, might well have been the second shooter at the grassy knoll.  _ That  _ Winter Soldier had been sent to kill her.

_ And she had lived.  _

“It was him,” she repeated. Her heart thumped and ached in her chest.

 

* * *

 

Clint took her to a farm in the middle of nowhere, an out of the way spot that she would have thought was just a safehouse if he hadn’t been so obviously nervous. He hopped out of the jet without looking at her, although he came around to her door to help her out immediately, and by the time he reached her his face was apologetic. "Sorry, it’s just—this is—” He shook his head and smiled crookedly before waving a hand. "You’ll meet her. Come on, I need you to solve one of my major security concerns.”

The farmhouse was old—older than was immediately obvious; someone had done a new paint job recently, had touched up the woodwork and added on a back wing—but not ancient. Probably early thirties. There were cedar trees planted tall and close forming a windbreak against the shrieking gales that would shoot down the plains, and a woodpile that showed what happened to slackers who didn’t pull their fair share of the load. The front porch was also wood, probably more of the same. There was a woman coming down the stairs towards them.

“Laura,” Clint introduced her, "this is Nat, my partner. Nat, this is Laura—my wife.”

 

* * *

 

It explained a bit, Natasha thought. A bit about how Clint had always been... not  _ careful  _ with her, that wasn’t it, but... brotherly. He had never hit on her, never showed any interest in it. She had half been convinced he had a thing for Coulson, but that, she supposed, had simply been a cover for this. 

Laura shooed her into the house and Clint off to go change. She set Natasha up on the couch and watched her take a dose of the Percocet she had been prescribed before stooping down, picking up and handing her a—

“Baby,” Natasha said in alarm. She blinked. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. 

“This is Cooper,” Laura said. "He ate not long ago, you don’t have to do anything, but he gets restless if he doesn’t have someone to cuddle, and I have cabbages to harvest.”

“Cabbages?” Natasha stared down at Cooper, who was less than a year old and round in a way Natasha had forgotten a healthy human being could be. Cooper gummed back up at her and then flopped over alarmingly; he sort of  _ looked  _ like cabbages, all stacked on top of each other and ready to topple over. Natasha reached out a hand to catch his head, but he stopped before knocking it into anything. Even if he hadn’t, she realized belatedly, it would only have been the couch, which was padded enough he wouldn’t have hurt himself, anyway. 

Natasha frowned down at Cooper, unsure whether to be more disturbed by the way he looked like he would fall apart at any second, or by the fact that she would apparently be responsible for him when he did.

Cooper nuzzled into her side and fell asleep. 

“Thanks,” said Laura.

This didn’t  _ happen  _ to Natasha. Clint had introduced her to his  _ wife and small child.  _ That wasn’t possible. Natasha was an  _ assassin— _ and worse than that, a spy. Nobody trusted her. Fury didn’t trust her. Hell,  _ Coulson  _ didn’t trust her, and she had been following his orders for years. And this was more important than a mere state secret, this was Clint’s  _ wife  _ and  _ child.  _

This didn’t  _ happen  _ to Natasha, and she couldn’t—she didn’t know—“What do I  _ do?”  _ she blurted. 

Cooper didn’t give her any answers. 

Terrified, honored, and doped up, she dropped into an uneasy sleep, a sleepy baby still nuzzled up to her side.

 

* * *

 

She stayed with Clint and Laura—and Cooper, and  _ Lila,  _ who it turned out also existed _ — _ for nearly three months. 

She spent most of her time asleep at first; the Percocet was her friend, and Cooper bonded to her adamantly during those weeks. Soon Clint and Laura were joking that Cooper thought Nat was his real mom. Natasha tried not to be terrified by this.

Recovery was as slow and irritating as it always was. Laura was good about finding things for Natasha to do, but they were frequently boring things, and so not much relief. It only took two days for Natasha to hate the sight of beans. 

Knitting was even worse.

But there were books, too, and those weren’t so bad; they didn’t make the time pass quickly, but they made the long drawn-out expanses of it tolerable, at least. And once her stomach had healed enough for her to stand and walk a bit she was able to play with Lila. Lila, although only four, was active and clever, so she  _ did  _ make the time pass quickly. She was also horse-mad, running up to the great beasts on her chubby little legs and greeting them like old friends. Natasha supposed that was what they were, but they were also large, dangerous mammals, and they didn’t seem to like Natasha any more than she liked them. Lila was oblivious to the mutual animosity between her and them, though, and so she suffered through learning to ride with the grim bravery and pain tolerance that only a Russian Assassin Ballerina could have. 

Clint said nothing about the speed of her recovery, although he noticed. The closest he came was sitting on the couch one night, maybe a month before Natasha was due to report back to SHIELD. Natasha was in the center of the couch, head tilted back into the thin cushion of the back. Clint was on her left, laying upside down with his head falling off the seat and his legs kicked over the back; his hands were folded across his stomach in an upside-down parody of the stereotypical “hick farmer” pose. Cooper, as usual, was tucked into Nat’s side, sleeping soundly, occasionally nuzzling into her just hard enough to put pressure on the healing wound. 

They were all three of them quiet, although neither of the adults was asleep. On the television, a game show played, muted by the button on the remote. 

Cooper nuzzled again, harder, and Natasha grunted, gently moving the toddler’s head out of her gut. Clint’s eyes flicked over to her. "Need me to take him?” he asked. His voice was quiet in a way that Natasha immediately identified as “stakeout, noise protocols.” A second later, she realized it was actually “sleeping baby, quiet time” instead.

She shook her head. "I’ve got him.” 

Clint nodded—funny looking, given his position—and let his head fall back, watching a woman spin an enormous wheel on the television. 

“M glad you’re here,” he said. He didn’t look away from the TV as he said it, but he was obviously talking to her.

“Free childcare,” she agreed. A deflection; that wasn’t what he had meant. It was unfair of her to imply that it had been. 

But, “Nah,” he said easily. "You’re terrible at that—don’t look like that, you’re getting better. Nah, though. It’s more...” He swung his head from side to side along the thin mattress that made up the cushion of the sofa. "It’s more, I don’t like my life segmented. And it’s gotta be, you know? Because Laura, she’s great, but she’s a  _ farmer  _ who writes  _ historical romance novels:  _ she’s not built for our world. But sometimes, I can bring some of  _ our  _ world  _ here,  _ and that’s... nice. You fit. Better’n my soulmate, actually.” He smiled up at her, open and easy and happy. "Even if you do sometimes hold my child like he’s a live grenade.”

“I’ve smelled his diapers—he  _ is  _ a live grenade.” She was speaking automatically, though, the banter falling from her lips without lingering on her tongue. Her mind was reeling, shocked by the revelation Clint had just handed to her. It hadn’t been an accident, she knew; he was too circumspect, too trained by a lifetime of secrets, to let that slip so carelessly. No, he wanted her to know. He wanted her to ask. 

She licked her lips nervously. There was a closeness, here, a commitment to their partnership that she was ashamed to realize she would have preferred to leave unspoken. It would have been easier... but less fair. He had given her so much, bringing her here, and now he was telling her he had been glad to give it. 

It wouldn’t be fair to not ask. And she wanted to be fair to her...  _ partner.  _ That was what he was, she realized. Her partner. 

Time to act like it, she supposed. 

Her lips trembled as she opened them, parting with a small wet noise Clint almost certainly couldn’t hear. "Coulson?”

Clint nodded. He wasn’t looking at her, but his jaw was tight. 

“I’m sorry.”

_ Now  _ he was looking at her. "It’s fine,” he said sharply. He turned away again, puffing out a breath. It made his chest rise and fall oddly, given his position. "It’s fine,” he repeated to the ceiling. "He’s... He’s not like me, you know?”

“There are some differences.” Natasha made sure the smile was in her voice. 

“Ha!” Clint darted a guilty look at the sleeping baby, but Cooper continued to drool into oblivion. Clint continued more quietly, “But, no, he’s not... He can’t mix work and pleasure. He said he’s tried before, and it’s not... So we don’t. He, uhhh, he knew I liked Laura, and he told me to go for it. He  _ told me  _ to. Said that what we had... it would never be what she and I had, so I should...”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“You don’t  _ gotta  _ be,” Clint insisted. "He’s not—he’s not a storybook, okay, this isn’t something to  _ fix.  _ It’s just how he is, and I realized... If I love him—and I do—I gotta fit into the pieces of his life that’ll hold me. And he fits into the pieces of mine that’ll hold him. Just, sometimes it takes some stretching. That’s all.”

Natasha nodded slowly, knowing Clint would see it in his peripheral vision even without looking at her. "You’re not lovers, then?”

“Oh, sure. But not, you know,  _ often.  _ And not when he’s on the clock.”

Natasha scowled. "He’s always on the clock.”

“Nah— _ almost _ always.” Clint grinned, finally looking at her, boyish mischief in his eyes. "You gotta make your chances.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. 

“Anyway...” Clint rolled backwards off the futon, somersaulting to his feet then turning and flinging himself back onto the couch, sitting upright this time. "...We make it work. Laura likes him, anyway, and he’s the only boss I’ve ever had a good working relationship with, so. You know. We get by.” He stretched his shoulders and added in an afterthought, “Fury  _ hates  _ it.”

Natasha smiled, stroking a hand down Cooper’s back as if he were a cat. 

She knew what she had to do, now. Clint had shared something important to him, something secret and dangerous. Something close to his heart. Natasha should do the same. But Natasha was a creature made to hold her secrets close—had been  _ forced  _ to hold them close, guard them, on pain of... pain. It was her strength, usually. Certainly it was why the Black Widow was so dangerous. But times like now...

Clint needed to hear something from her. Psychologically speaking: Natasha was very familiar with the human mind, she  _ knew  _ he needed to hear it. Otherwise, he would feel the rejection, would consider her less trustworthy. And she was sitting in his house, holding his child, so he  _ needed  _ to be able to trust her. He deserved that peace of mind.

But more than that, he deserved honesty. Natasha wore a dozen different faces as easily as changing her clothes, but Clint deserved to have the real Natasha, as much as anyone could. If there even  _ was  _ a real Natasha  _ to  _ share with him.

Cooper was heavy and warm, his breath soft and milky. Lila was upstairs, four years old and already ferocious. Laura was awake in her office, which doubled as a greenhouse, typing away with a scowl on her face. The horses were healthy. The crops here were growing strong. The house was shabby but loved. 

Natasha was tired of being Natasha.

Clint always called her Nat. 

She tried it out, tasting the name in her mind. Nat would be able to have this, baby Cooper and tiny warrior Lila and Laura’s warm haggard smile over coffee when she’d been up too late working out a scene. Nat didn’t have to be a civilian—Nat  _ couldn’t  _ be a civilian, and Clint wouldn’t want her to—but she could do this much, anyway. She could share a secret.

Natasha couldn’t, but Natasha had her own problems.  _ Nat  _ got to open up if she chose.

“I’ve met my soulmate,” Nat said.

Clint went sniper-still for a second: not rigidly still, but the smooth, organic stillness which was harder to see. She had surprised him. "I thought you didn’t have one,” he said, confirming it. "You said your soulscape was empty.”

Nat shrugged a shoulder. "My soulscape is huge. It would be easy to miss someone in it. I only saw him there once; it was easy to tell SHIELD that I hadn’t seen him, at all.” She tipped her head to the side and forced herself to add the reflection out loud: “Especially since that’s the same thing I told the Red Room.”

“Yeah, but they’d have killed you if they knew,” said Clint, who knew her and knew how she had been formed. She almost cried with gratitude.

“SHIELD would, too, considering who... I mean, considering.”

The look on Clint’s face was alarmed, but not as alarmed as he should have been. He was looking at the television, still, but she could tell he had her in his peripherals, waiting for her to continue, ready to figure it out.

Nat reached down and picked up Cooper, moving him around to the other side where he settled in with a grumble. She looked down at Clint and then, deliberately, pressed a hand over her wound, now almost closed up. "He had me in his sights,” she said. " _ And he missed.”  _

“Huh!” Clint’s eyes widened, shocked, but he didn’t look up at her, leaving her some privacy. He also didn’t ask stupid questions, like,  _ Are you sure it was him?  _ He had asked that in the jet, and she had answered then. He was doing her the honor of trusting that the answer still held.

Nat—or maybe this part was Natasha—watched him thinking it over, turning all the moving pieces around in his mind. He kept looking at the television, watching an overweight man in a Hawaiian shirt jump as a blond lady in an evening gown turned around letters. "I guess that makes sense, you being with him,” he said finally. "Especially since you’re both... you know.”

She didn’t ask; just looked at him, trying and failing to be blank-faced.

“Since you’re neither of you... normal.” he said. "I’m assuming, anyway. It’s been, what? Fifty years for him? Longer? And then you have your...” He gestured at her, vaguely, and that was when she realized he meant the way she had healed. She bit her lip savagely and made a conscious effort to stay Nat.

“...My years,” she filled in for him. 

He looked at her sharp, the gaze he usually only showed to a target. "Got those too, huh?”

“I told you my file was wrong.” 

He laughed raggedly. "In a lot of ways, I guess.” On the screen, the man in the Hawaiian shirt was buying a vowel. He picked O. There were no O’s. He bid to solve, and somehow got it right, turning L _ _ E S _ D E   _ E T _ W _ _ into a lakeside getaway. 

Clint asked, “You trying to turn him?”

Natasha blinked. 

She hadn’t thought of it that way; once again, Clint was upending everything, putting it back in a way that made more sense. Her soulmate was her enemy; very well, then: flip him. "You make it sound so simple,” she stalled. "But... convert him to  _ what?  _ Do you think SHIELD will take him? And he’s not exactly going to retire—”

But she stopped herself there. 

She had found him in a cage.

Clint was watching. "Don’t know him well enough to say, do you?”

Nat warred with Natasha, won, and then shook her head. "Doesn’t matter,” she said thickly. "The part of my soulscape he’s in... It’s locked. I can pound on the door until my fingers break, but I’m not getting in.” 

She had tried it, once. In the hospital after he shot her. Her hands had ached in the waking world for the next two days. Psychosomatic. 

“Besides...” She made herself smile, made her voice lighten, exhausted by all this openness and ready to be Natasha once more. "I’m not exactly the most respectable myself.”

“Hey, you flipped the Black Widow.” Clint grinned, following her cue to return to their usual dynamic, swinging his legs around and accidentally falling off the couch. She blinked, touched. He really was the best possible partner. "Hard to get much more impressive than that!” He scooped Cooper gently out of her arms, then bounced towards the kitchen. "I’m thinking, three a.m. pancakes. Do you want pancakes? Let’s make pancakes.”

“It’s only ten,” she said blankly.

“We’ll do them early, then! Blueberries? Chocolate chips...?”

 

* * *

 

Nat didn’t say anything, but she kept Clint’s suggestion in mind. Flipping the Winter Soldier: she couldn’t say it wasn’t a challenge. For one thing, she had to  _ find  _ him first.

She made a hobby of it, collecting all the intel she could on him. In the wake of her own shooting still, she had an excuse to requisition all the records. She made copies of everything, especially the ones you weren’t allowed to copy, then put them all back. The copies went to Clint, who nodded and talked Laura into hiding them amidst her research notes. It was easy to hide anything if the two inches of papers on either side were all about fashions in the 1820’s. 

It wasn’t looking good. 

The Soldier didn’t seem to  _ exist  _ between his targets, a blank space in the records that sent a shudder down Nat’s back, although she couldn’t have said why. But the interesting thing was that when she put together all the targets...

Or ostensible targets, she reminded herself, putting her hand over the now-healed hole in her gut.

...there was no  _ pattern.  _ His first few targets were all Russians, but while half of them were loyal Communist workers, half of them were enemies of the state. After that, he expanded, rapidly, and there were a set of over forty targets all over Europe and Russia which  _ may or may not  _ have been his work. Some of them  _ may or may not  _ have actually been the accidents they looked like. There were no common threads that connected them.

And after  _ that,  _ it got even bigger and more random. Someone had made a file, some junior agent set to research him as a punishment she was guessing, and there were over three hundred targets in that one, from 1959 to 1993. Junior Agent had offered a guess for each as to whether it was  _ certain, possible, unlikely,  _ or  _ undeterminable  _ that the kill was his. They were mostly  _ possible  _ and _ undeterminable;  _ there were few certainties about anything when it came to the Soldier. 

And after that, the trail ran dry. There were half a dozen hits that  _ could  _ have been his scattered through the early nineties, but nothing afterwards, not for over fifteen years. And, Nat reminded herself, even the hit on _ her  _ hadn’t been reported...

The hair rose on the back of her neck. How many pieces of this puzzle was she missing?

She put all the files carefully back where she’d found them. She continued to keep her mouth shut about who the shooter was. Time passed, and her medical leave ended. She was given another assignment, an infiltration in Mumbai. She took Clint with her, this time. 

The Soldier didn’t show.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam’s soulscape was an open, airy rampart, and he loved it from the first time he set foot there. The sky was usually blue—sometimes cloudy and blowsy, but never storming or wet—and the birds swooped above like they were inviting him to come play. His heart leaped upward as if it could join them, every time.

The door to the ramparts was locked—Sam checked—but that wasn’t really an inhibition. The building he was on, some kind of a castle, was _huge,_ and there was plenty of room to run around and even climb, up here. And the view was something else, too: beautiful gardens that faded into well-tended orchards in the distance, and on the other side, a gravel pathway that curved around into nothing.

It was a hell of a thing for a preacher’s son from the inner city. Sam had had a serious talk with his dad about avarice and sloth, and exactly how to handle this in the right way. Heavy stuff, for a nine-year-old. But he loved the place: he would climb onto the battlements—no danger of falling in a dream—and spread his arms wide, letting the air push at him like a river. Baptism by wind. _Amazing._

And then he was twelve, and there was Riley, and that was even more amazing, still.

The first time Sam met Riley, Sam was standing on the really _extra_ _tall_ crenelation at the south-east corner of the ramparts, arms spread as a blustery wind whipped in. Leaves from the orchard whipped around him like he was some kind of modern-day Pocahontas or something, and although he couldn’t see—his eyes were closed—there was a bird high above, screeching as it played with the currents, same as Sam was doing. 

And then there was another cry—not a bird—and hands grabbed hard at the back of Sam’s shirt, hauling him backward with enough force that he tumbled on his ass onto the stonework floor. He rolled to see a white guy, blond, shaggy hair, roughly his own age, maybe minus a year or two. The guy put his hands on his hips—for real?—and glared. 

“What kind of dumb-ass slow-thinking Evil Knievel _moron_ do I _have_ as a soulmate, anyway?!” he demanded. 

Sam stared up at him, heedless of the scolding he was receiving. "Oh my god,” he blurted. "My soulmate’s a _redneck!”_

 

* * *

 

Riley was, in fact, a redneck: he was from Alabama, lived and breathed the Crimson Tide, worshiped God and his country in approximately equal measure, and had the most dumbass, conservative, hidebound family it was possible for a boy to have. Sam managed to tell his parents all of about three things about Riley before they figured out Riley was white, but Riley never told his folks a damn _thing_ about Sam, because Sam was Black and he was a man and Riley wasn’t sure which would be worse. 

And god _damn_ did Riley say some dumbass things before Sam managed to talk him out of them! Most of the time he wouldn’t even realize they were awful until Sam reacted, just casually dropping slurs and Klan phrases like they were everyday parts of speech. At first Sam took it personally, sure that Riley was fucking with him, but no, it was really how Riley had been raised. Eventually, it dawned on Sam that Riley _really was_ just _that_ clueless—aided by Riley’s obvious misery when he saw how upset Sam got—and then the tutelage began. Slowly, together, tiny piece by tiny piece, they whittled away at Riley’s hate-based upbringing, carving him into someone who Sam could see himself someday bringing home to his mama.

It wasn’t like there wasn’t a lot of good there. Riley had more nature-knowledge than anyone Sam had ever met, and he could cook, too—or at least, so he claimed. More importantly, he was strong, and good-hearted, and generous; he cared about doing the right thing, and he loved Sam to death. Sam was pretty sure that was all his mama had _ever_ wanted for him.

Riley spent the first five years of their acquaintance insisting that they were gonna be platonics and then turned around and stuck his tongue down Sam’s throat. 

When Riley was eighteen and Sam was twenty, they both enlisted in the Air Force. Riley had been dying to enlist for ages, and Sam wanted to fly; the Air Force was their compromise. Sam had filled the two years in between with getting EMT certified, and was quickly sorted into Pararescue (like a _badass,_ he liked to brag to Riley). Riley took a little longer, but within two years, they were working, living, and sleeping together—although only the first two were things they shared with anyone. Sam dated around a little, because he genuinely did like girls, and they needed the cover. Riley just smiled and claimed, “I’m saving myself for my soulmate,” which was technically true, but _also_ the biggest pile of horseshit Sam had ever heard.

Riley’s family never got easier. He had two older brothers and a sister on either side, and all of them were firmly religious of the “anyone not like us is going to hell” bent. Riley crumpled a little bit whenever he had to go home, and Sam spent a lot of time holding him close and just being there for him, not judging because there had to be somebody in Riley’s life who didn’t.

One night, they were in Helmand Province, closing on Garmsir. The air was dust and rock, dry as bones. The night was filled with crackles, the kinds of small sounds you got when dozens of men were camped in hostile territory with no grass to muffle them. The mountains rose high and cold around them, like a cage. It took ages to fall asleep, and Sam knew as he did it that he would have to wake before long: he and Riley were on watch at 0500. 

But still, he managed to catch the dream-bus eventually. He opened his eyes onto battlements and looked around. 

Riley was on the top of the tallest battlement again, back where he and Sam had met for the first time over a decade ago. He sat on the edge of the wall, his back to the abyss, watching Sam as he came towards him with despairing, resolute eyes. 

It was out of character, and Sam’s heart both fell and quickened. Riley was the lighthearted one, the dramatic one, the joker. He was the guy who would sass the commanding officer and get away with it, every time, because he was just so charming. He was a quick grin in the darkness when the gunfire sounded. Sam swallowed a lump in his throat. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Riley said. But he didn’t smile. 

“Uh-huh.” Sam came closer. "Bullshit, man. What’s _wrong?”_

 _Now_ came the smile—quick, and small, and sad. "Nothing—it’s not. It’s good. It’s time. I know it’s the right thing to do, but...” Riley sighed and leaned forward, bracing with his hands gripping the edge of the wall. His fingers were long and strong, and the back of Sam’s mind noticed that before setting it aside. It wasn’t that they hadn’t made love in the soulscape—they definitely had, and many times—but Riley obviously wasn’t in the mood. "Sent my folks a letter this morning. Told them about us.”

Sam’s eyes widened. "Riles. Babe. You didn’t have to.” He stepped up to Riley, cupping Riley’s chin in his hands and tilting his face up to meet his eyes. Riley gave him another sad smile.

“Nah. I know.” 

“So why _did_ you?”

“Cause.” Riley’s lips spread wider, the expression edging into wickedness. A gleam of real happiness lit him from within. "As soon as I decided to do it, I figured out how to do _this.”_

With the final word, wings spread from behind Riley’s back. The wingpack, Sam recognized it, but it wasn’t: the wingpack had straps that not only went around the arms, but hooked in front of the chest. Riley wasn’t wearing a pack, Sam was certain of it. The wings were there anyway, though, broad and beautiful, like an angel’s, pale early-morning sunlight glinting off of each metal feather. Riley rose about five feet and then hovered. The backdraft buffeted Sam, yet another sign that this was the Falcon gear despite the fact that Riley wasn’t wearing it. 

“How,” Sam said blankly.

Riley shrugged, wings beating slowly, beaming like the sun edging its way up over the edge of the battlements. "I thought it seemed like kind of a sign.”

 

* * *

 

They waited over a month to get the return letter from Riley’s folks, and for most of that month, they managed not to think about it. It was surprisingly easy when they had such purpose; when you were trying to save lives and the people trying to stop you had automatic weapons and rocket launchers, focusing on the moment became shockingly easy. And at night, on those nights when they managed a sleep deep enough to actually reach the soulscape, flying brought its own distraction. Riley carried Sam up hundreds of feet in the air and dropped him, once, twice, finally just letting him fall until Sam remembered the feel of the wings digging in against him and snap the suit open.

Backdraft and rocket exhaust, clouds and the dig of deceleration against his bones: the wings snapped open, catching him. He flew.

 

* * *

 

The letter, when it came, was five words long, unsigned but clearly written in Riley’s mother’s hand: _You are not our son._

It was the first time Sam ever entered the soulscape and found it storming. Clouds so dark they were the color of charcoal snarled together above the castle, and braziers lit on every corner of the walls lent the scene an eerie, flickering light. Lightning crashed, closer and closer each time, and Sam looked around for some exit to the battlements, scared for the first time since he had found his scape so long ago. The castle door was still locked, though, and there was no outside ladder. He was stuck.

He looked for Riley, then, searching around and around the walkways in a circle, over and over again. He had spent his whole life dreaming himself onto these paths, and he knew them like the back of his hand; he wasn’t going to find anything new just by circling them again. He knew when he started looking that Riley wasn’t going to be there, but still he searched, and he searched, and he searched.

 

* * *

 

When he woke up, Riley was still awake—the obvious reason he hadn’t been in the scape, of course—and staring sightlessly at the top of their lean-to. Wordlessly, Sam sat up, wrapping him in his arms. Riley rolled, and together they lay there, awake, for the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

From then on, the sky in their soulscape was never still. Clouds scudded across it fast, sometimes little fluffy ones, sometimes large, dark, roiling monstrosities that made Sam pray to wake up. They flew anyway, though; Riley was sure that the lightning would miss them, the same way it didn’t hurt birds, and while Sam wasn’t sure that logic worked, he was sure he had never heard of anyone dying in their soulscape. And flying seemed to take Riley’s mind off it a bit.

In the waking world, Riley changed. He got quiet, although his quick humor never faded. Instead of a bright-bubbling brook, though, it became a flash of light like a beam of sunlight, revealed and then quickly hidden again by clouds. The rest of the time he was quiet. He told Sam once that his world had narrowed down to Sam and their unit, and with his world a little smaller, he didn’t have to work so hard to fill it all up. 

As painful as his disowning was, Riley seemed to have found some manner of peace with it, too. It was like his family’s beliefs—their religion, their politics, their multitude of hatreds—had been a burning question in his mind, eating him up from the inside like he was the only fuel that could feed it. Now, that question was quenched, its voracious appetite at last abated, and Riley’s wounds inside, the raw spots where its teeth had dug in, were finally beginning to heal. 

The first time he laughed after the letter, it was awful. Like sand and rocks skidding across the metal hood of a HUMVEE in the aftermath of mortar fire. But the first time he laughed _right—_ the first time it welled up from inside of him, gentle and warm, folding the corners of his eyes and dimpling his cheeks the way it used to... Well, after that, Sam was sure they would make it. Riley would be okay.

Except he wouldn’t, it turned out.

Sam didn’t see the RPG coming. He knew what they did was dangerous—they had lost other men in their unit—and the armor they wore was nothing in the face of the kind of firepower they would face, but still... he didn’t realize—or, he realized, but he didn’t _know—_

Riley fell out of the sky, and somehow it seemed like all Sam could do was sit up there and watch.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, Sam’s superior officer called him in. He cited the “unusually close” nature of Sam and Riley’s friendship to send Sam home early—military code for “we’re sure you’re soulmates and we know you’re down for the count, but it’s against the regs and we can’t actually acknowledge it.” It had happened to two other airmen Sam had known. It wasn’t common enough for there to be actual rules around it, but it was still an understood thing.

“Will I be going home with the body, then, sir?”

Captain McNeely shifted awkwardly. "You have to understand, son, there was a lot of fire in the air...”

They hadn’t recovered the body. 

Sam didn’t sleep that night, either. 

The plane ride home was long and awful. The rest of the plane was full of another unit, a quarter of a company of men finally demobilizing after a year or more of sand and rock and gunfire. The mood on board was jocular, airmen shouting across the aisles, cracking jokes, party, filming it all on their iPhones. Sam sat next to the emergency exit through all of it, one hand on the handle as if he might make a jump for it at any time. He couldn’t, though; they had taken his wings. 

The flight was thirteen eons, the unloading and paperwork another seven. The neatly-pressed woman stamping off on him asked if he had been placed on leave or discharged, and he blinked at her stupidly. "I don’t know.” 

His Captain might have said, but Sam had been in no state to remember. And pararescue with Riley had been the plan for as long as he could remember; now that that dream was gone, what did he _want_ to do?

He wanted his wings back so sharply his shoulders hurt. No one tried to _talk_ to you when you were flying. No one asked you hard questions, like “how long are you staying?” and “do you have a ride home?”

He took the train to New York, although he and Riley had a place together in DC. He showed up on his mama’s doorstep with a duffel bag and a shellshocked expression, and all she had to do was take one look before she was folding him up in her arms and rocking him side to side, fully grown man but still her baby when everything had shaken out. 

He didn’t sleep _that_ night, either. 

In the morning, his mama burned a pot of decaf coffee and slipped three sleeping pills in under the bitterness.

 

* * *

 

The dreamscape was all storm and high winds again. The braziers on the corners of the castle walls sputtered in the onslaught of rain; Sam had barely taken one step before he was soaked to the skin. (In the real world, he would eventually wake and find himself cold and shivering, a clammy sweat having pasted his shirt to chest and then evaporated.) He kept moving, anyway. 

Something inside of him was on fire. It raged— _raged—_ at the idea that Riley was _gone,_ his lover, his friend, _his soulmate_ was _gone,_ and all that was left was this ancient castle, decrepit and crumbling under his feet, the walkways’ rough stones digging into the soles of his shoes. He pelted forward like he could chase down the one responsible, like he could find them, choke them, make them _take it back._ Riley had been his _soulmate,_ and now he was _gone,_ and the time Sam had had with him had been _too damned short._

He kept moving, on and on, and climbing every stair he found. It was only when he found himself at the top of the tower—the high point where he had met Riley that very first time, fifteen years ago—that he knew where he had been going all along. He clenched his fists and felt the wings spread out across his back.

It was thunder and lightning out, as Riley would have said. It was dangerous to fly.

But then, Riley was gone now, wasn’t he? Because it had _always_ been dangerous to fly.

Sam lifted off.

The winds around him were like semis, slamming into him, hurling him from one side to the other. He folded the wings up to reduce their drag and fired the thrusters, gaining altitude in spite of the tempest. He let himself fall, once, twice, each time spreading the wings wide to catch the gales, hurtling through the air like a cannonball. He fixed his gaze on the clouds and went up, up... He had no idea where he was going. He didn’t care, though. He was flying, and by god, he was going to _keep_ flying—

The lightning crashed around him, catching his wings, arcing over them and then over his back like a flail made of fire. He spasmed—

He dropped.

He was far up when the lighting had struck, high enough that he might not have been breathing well if this were a real place. He fell fast, the crashing lights around him terrifying now that he knew they could actually hurt him. The air whistled past his ears like rockets, and the wings _dragged_ on him, heavy weights pulling him back even as the winds of his fall blew his cheeks back painfully. The lightning crashed again, and the wings felt funny, felt _wrong,_ they weren’t handling right, they were—

One of his “feathers”, the aptly-shaped blades of titanium that housed the miniature thrusters that powered his suit, broke off. The hyper-conductive fluid that carried a charge throughout Sam’s wings streamed out behind him as he plummeted, off-center and spiraling. 

Somehow, over the shrieking of the winds, he heard the crack from his other side. He looked over and screamed as another “feather” broke off, flying away and behind him, almost too fast to track. He was struggling for control, now, spreading the wings, braking as best he could—which, in the face of the forces marshaled against him, wasn’t much. It wasn’t only the gravity and the wind. Any time he changed direction, he swung, and the centrifugal force numbed his limbs; the tendons and muscles of his arms ached from trying to steer, and the water soaking him to the bone added pounds to his weight. 

A popcorn series of breaking sounds carried clearly over the wind. For a second he thought he _might_ make it—they _might_ pop off one at a time, he _might_ have enough left to make it to the roof again—and then all the blades of his wings blew away at once, rose petals scattered by a rude boy’s thrown rock. He dropped, tumbling, spreading his arms and legs they way they had taught him but he already knew it would do him no good. The gale-force winds were nothing to him now; he fell straight, arms stretched to reach the familiar balustrades of his soulscape but missing it by hundreds of yards. 

He kicked and flailed as he came closer and closer to the ground, then, with a suddenness that shocked him, accepted it. Okay, he was dying. Riley was already gone. He was in his late twenties, and now he had to be alone for the rest of his life? This was an okay alternative, really. It could be worse. Maybe this was the right way to go.

It would be nice to go the same way Riley had, really.

He hit the ground.

He... bounced. 

Not the way a _real_ body would, a broken, sad little bump, but a _true_ bounce, comical, clown-like, as if the ground were a trampoline. He had time to realize what was happening, and to blink, and then he hit the top of the arc and was hurtling downward again, confused and indignant that the soulscape wouldn’t _actually_ let him die.

He hit the ground again, and _this_ time the bounce was the sick kind, the kind he’d been expecting. Pain flared throughout his body as the thud sounded, loud as a cannon blast in the soft dirt. He slid on his side, skidding across the ground, leaving a straight-line trail between two rows of cabbages. Fire raked down his exposed bicep as small rocks tore the skin. 

Sam lay still after he came to a stop, aching and burning all over, and, moreover, alone in his soulscape. He listened, but he could hear nothing besides the grumble of now-distant lightning and the hissing rush of the pouring rain.

He passed out.

 

* * *

 

When he woke up, his mother’s favorite afghan was thrown over him, and he was asleep in the LaZBoy that had once been his father’s. The sun was setting.

Riley was still dead.


	5. Chapter 5

SAM

* * *

 

 

He couldn’t avoid the dreamscape forever. He sure as hell tried, though. Over the course of the next week, he barely slept when his mom didn’t drug him. When she did, he slept deep and dreamless, one small mercy in a week of hell.

None of Riley’s family came to the funeral, and all of their unit were back in Afghanistan. It was just Sam, his mom, his sister Shelby, and the priest. It rained the entire time.

Afterward, Shelby took him to a bar, a plasticy, commercial kind of joint just a little bit more than walking distance from the house. She shoved him onto a barstool and slapped a piece of black plastic down on the counter. She made eye contact with the bartender, her gaze flat and adamantine. "You are going to pour this man anything he wants,” she said. "He’s not driving. I am going to pay for it, and I am going to tip you very,  _ very  _ well. Say yes.”

The bartender blinked. He looked down at the card and blinked again, then back up at her before nodding deferentially. "Yes,  _ ma’am! _ Sir? What did you want?” 

Sam looked at the row of taps and got lost, shrugging listlessly. 

The bartender blinked again. "Right. I got you.” He reached for the vodka, nodding reassuringly at Shelby, and proceeded to get Sam absolutely plastered. Shelby sat with him the whole time, then paid the tab—she tipped eight hundred dollars; the bartender almost cried—and poured Sam into a cab with her to get him home. 

Sometimes alcohol made it easier to get to the soulscape, but other times it blocked you. Sam got lucky, that night, and blacked out solidly. He slept with no dreams, no memories, and no tears.

 

* * *

Captain Carman was a staff officer with sad eyes but a friendly smile. He showed up at the door in full uniform, and for a hot minute Sam was convinced he was about to be arrested. The captain was sympathetic, though. He explained that, in cases like Sam’s, the air force typically sent out a recruitment officer to evaluate the mental status of the remaining soulmate. 

The captain coughed. "The friend, I mean. The one left behind, with whom you were unusually close.” 

“Right,” Sam agreed, “the friend.” His lips felt numb. His entire  _ body  _ felt numb. 

“I have to say, Wilson, as these things go, you don’t look too good. Some guys, that’s fine; they stay in and they get the structure they need... but that may not be you, and you’ll know you best. So you tell me: do you  _ want  _ to stay in?”

Sam had been planning to enlist from the time he was seventeen... because that was Riley’s dream. 

Riley wasn’t dreaming of that, anymore.

“I always just wanted to help people,” Sam said honestly. "The military was...”

Captain Carman was already nodding. By the time the captain left, Sam had already signed five pieces of paper for his discharge. 

 

* * *

The first time Sam landed back in the soulscape after the funeral, he woke himself right back up again with his sheer pissed-off aggression. He opened his eyes in the scape, took one look around at the neatly mulched trails and planted rows, and started running, arms pumping, legs stretching out long, desperate to be anywhere but where he was until he shot upright in bed, flailing and falling on the floor in a tangle of blanket. 

The second time he woke up in the soulscape, though, he stopped to think. 

No one— _ no one— _ had two soulscapes. That was a thing that never happened, ever. Some people, though... Some people went from one part of their soulscape to the other, and the difference was so dramatic it  _ seemed  _ like two different places. That was obviously what was going on here.

Sam remembered the sensation of falling, remembered crashing into the ground with a thud that should have broken every bone in his body. All he had to do was look around to see the castle, the ramparts he had spent his whole life running on. They looked small from all the way down here.

He could turn it around in his head, too. He remembered the view from up there, remembered the lake on one side, the gardens on the other, stretching out and out until they ran into the deep, dark woods that otherwise surrounded the castle. The trees grew tall and thick, the kind of forest a city boy like Sam could easily dread, but if he were in there, lost in the woods, he wouldn’t have to look at the building, the high walls where he had so often been so happy.

He set out for the woods.

The gardens were large, and he didn’t reach the trees that first night. He kept going the next time he hit the dreamscape, passing into the dense, cool covers of the trees just as the dream sun came out from behind a bank of clouds, ready to turn all the wet air into soup. It was a relief to be in the shade.

The thing about the dreamscapes was, they always had borders. If your scape was a building, it had walls; if your scape was a field, it had a fence. There had been a girl in Sam’s high school who’d had the whole district of Harlem as her scape, and when she got to 155th street the ground had just fallen away. Harlem had been elevated a couple thousand feet in the air onto a giant mesa, surrounded on all sides by precipice. Now  _ that  _ was a barrier. 

A forest, though? Not so much. If Sam could walk around in there, it was part of his soulscape.

So he did.

 

* * *

Sam wasn’t out completely discharged as soon as Captain Carman left—there were too many hoops to jump through for that—but he was out within a year and grateful for it. He went back to school at his mom’s insistence, half-heartedly stumbling through his classes. He was smart enough to get As with only routine levels of effort, but surprisingly, the classes actually  _ did  _ give him an idea for what to do next. As he was sorting out his tuition—the VA was paying, but they were dragging their heels about it—he wound up taking charge of the whole situation, and two thirds of the way through he remembered that there were people out there whose jobs specifically included making sure people did their paperwork right.  And from there, he realized that maybe, just maybe, that might be something he could do.

It was crazy; he was an EMT, not a social worker. And taking care of his own paperwork was a long way away from providing counseling and more for the folks coming back from the front. But it was  _ a  _ direction, where before he hadn’t had any, and when he mentioned his plan to his own counselor, she didn’t look at him like he was crazy. She almost looked a little bit proud.

So he switched his major to social work, and just like that, he was on a real path again.  He graduated, got a job at the VA, started working to help his fellow veterans... They moved him to DC so that he could be in the epicenter, boosted his caseload and gave him the group counseling sessions, too...

It wasn’t enough.

Sam was treading water, and he knew it. This wasn’t a permanent solution. He wanted more action, wanted the adrenaline and the fight. He talked to the guys who became cops, but... No. Just no. EMTs had too high a burnout rate, and it was easy to see why. Shelby was pressuring him to become an ER doctor—she was a pediatric cardiologist, and rolling in it—but Sam remembered the walking nightmare faces on the guys taking organic chem, and he knew he didn’t want to put himself through a minimum of six years of that. No, thank you.

So it kept itching—the need to move, the need to  _ rescue— _ like sugar ants crawling around under his skin. But he didn’t have a solution, he didn’t have a  _ plan,  _ no way off of the dead end trail on which he found himself, so he just... kept going.

 

* * *

All soulscapes had borders, but it took years for Sam to find the border of his. The forest was large and dim, the trees tall and broad enough to block most of the sunlight. Few plants grew beneath them, and the ones that did were small and scraggly as an old man’s beard. There were no paths beneath the trees, but because of the lack of shrubbery there were plenty of open spaces where a man could walk, even a man of Sam’s height and breadth of shoulder. 

It took years to be certain, years in which Sam mostly slept too deeply to reach the soulscape—often assisted by the sleep aids his doctor pressed on him, sometimes by a six-pack of beer instead. Years in which Sam found his way to a career which helped people, but which didn’t satisfy, and watched the sky in his dreamscape grow correspondingly lighter, but not clear. Years of wandering the open spaces beneath the arms of trees like giants, aimless and lonely. 

Sam never saw another person in his scape the entire time he wandered.

There were no paths in his forest, but there was a heart, a clearing where the roots of the trees formed recessions like camp chairs, where the grass was soft and thick enough to sit on. By all rights there should have been a massive pile of shrubs in the middle of the only patch of sunlight in the wood, but there wasn’t: just a flat plain of grass, and in the center, a ring of thin, stalky mushrooms.

Sam wasn’t a botanist; he didn’t know what the mushrooms were called. He wasn’t even sure that would  _ be  _ a botanist; weren’t mushrooms fungi, instead of plants? He didn’t know if they were real mushrooms, either, or something his mind had just made up, cobbled together from dandelions and SuperMario games. Whatever they were—or weren’t—they had spindly little stalks and pale, globular heads, like Japanese lanterns on long, bendy poles. They didn’t glow, not even in that natural bioluminescence way that would have been sort of reasonable; they were just pale. But Sam always expected them to give off an eerie, unholy light, the kind of light that looked like a theremin sounded. He watched the mushroom globes out of the corners of his eyes and avoided the ring whenever possible. In fact, as pleasant as it otherwise was, he avoided the whole clearing.

It wasn’t easy. There were no paths in his forest, but if he wandered long enough, the open spaces would trend back to the heart of the place, like a compass needle swinging around under his feet to point north. That was the border this place put up: no walls, no cliffs, just impossibility that caught you by the ankle and turned you gently back the way you’d been going.

It was infuriating.

 

* * *

Riley’s birthday was in April, almost ten months after he died, which was a damned good thing because Sam wouldn’t have made it if it had only been one or two. He wouldn’t have made it if it had been five months, either—the holidays were shitty enough without that—or even seven, in the heart of winter. But it was a lot harder to let yourself go too far when your job took you out in the sunlight every day and the whole world was doing its damnedest to bloom. And Sam had always had a low tolerance for bullshit, even his own.

Not to say he didn’t struggle. Grief still took him at odd moments, unpredictable as a suckerpunch. He would hear an accent—not even Riley’s accent, he got it once from a chick from  _ Minnesota— _ and all of a sudden he’d be fighting a sense of all-consuming loss. One of his coworkers invited him to go camping, and he teared up thinking of how much Riley had loved that shit. And then, all the damned time still, he would see a cloud and think of flying...

That was the other loss he had to contend with. It wasn’t enough that he had lost his soulmate; he’d lost flying, too. The fuckin’  _ air,  _ as he had phrased it loudly one night into the last of several beers. Shelby had gotten him private pilot lessons, and he hadn’t been able to sit through the first one. He wound up broken down on the floor of the little Cessna, sobbing into the instructor’s knees about how much Riley would have loved to be there. The instructor had patted him on the back and visibly wished she were anywhere else.  

So he couldn’t fly. He tracked down his wings anyway, just to know what was going on. He still had a friend in the program, although Mitch said they were decommissioning the whole thing; the brain trust behind them was being moved on to other things. Sam’s wings— Falcon pack #8700073 — were given to a new guy, who got shot down on a rescue three days before drawdown started. One by one, all the other packs were destroyed in combat. The last three were withdrawn at the end of the conflict; two of those were given to the eggheads, destroyed in the pursuit of improvement. One pack remained, locked safely out of anyone’s reach.

Sam spent way too long thinking about how to get it back, anyway.

One Riley’s birthday, Shelby planned ahead to meet him at the bar. She couldn’t know about the Falcon project, but  _ could  _ indulge her familiar terrible sense of humor, so when she showed up with a life-sized Ken doll, she had it wearing an angel costume. She propped it in the booth next to them, blond hair and blue eyes and  _ wings,  _ utterly ironic, painfully apt except for the part where it was three feet tall because life-sized Ken dolls were still only made for six-year-old girls. 

Sam laughed until he cried, then drank until he cried, and then just cried.

Shelbs patted his pack resignedly and poured him into a cab.

 

* * *

Sam dreamed that night of endless tall trees, wide dark spaces between their trunks. The scene was wrong, somehow, different than his soulscape normally looked, but he couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t put his finger on why. He frowned, listening to the wind rushing amidst the trees.

It sounded...  _ thin.  _

He started running, hoping for the border of the wood—he hadn’t seen the castle gardens in years, but he absolutely believed they were still there—unwilling to be amongst all these trees when whatever was going to happen did. He still remembered the night after Riley’s death, the storm that had scored lines of pain across his back and grounded him forever. He wasn’t doing  _ that  _ much better, now.

He fell into a steady lope, not a jog but a different, more serious kind of run. The kind of run he did in real life every Saturday, the one he saved for the high-mileage day of the week. It did what it was meant to do and took him over the ground quickly, but that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? The woods didn’t like being crossed quickly; they didn’t like it when he travelled far, either. They pushed back, subtly, twisting their shape around the trunks until Sam, stumbling on the nothing, found himself in the central clearing once again. 

The blast of cold air hit him suddenly, fast and hard when it wasn’t hampered by the massive trunks of the wood. He looked up reflexively, staring up into a roiling gray sky. It was dark, but not nighttime, and not misty the way it sometimes was when he was wrestling with something. As he watched, silvery precipitation came down, only reaching Sam’s level here in the clearing where it didn’t have to contend with trees. 

Sam held out his hand flat, shaking with leftover adrenaline, catching three small flakes on his palm and fingers.

It was snowing.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, it's Sunday! I have had a shitty, shitty day y'all, so if you're on the fence about leaving a comment, please know that it will be extra welcome today. :)

* * *

**STEVE**

_1928_

* * *

 

It had to be the soulscape. _Had_ to be. Steve hadn’t ever been anywhere like this, hadn’t ever even imagined it. So it had to be the soulscape, didn’t it?

The grass under his feet was short and soft, softer than the grass in the park by far. The air was moist and sweet, green with growing things. Steve’s lungs in his chest were quiet, no hint of a whistle to his breathing. The grass had small yellow flowers spotted among the leaves; Steve didn’t know what they were called, but they reminded him of his mother, small and dainty and proud.

The trees around him grew tall and strong, like enormous saints guarding the gates of heaven. There was no scrub between them and few vines or the like, only the short, velvety grass like a rich man’s lawn. It was easy to walk over, at least.

At first the soulscape was—well, a dream, no pun intended. Steve could _run!_ He could _jump large roots_ and do _cartwheels_ and _somersaults_ and _not die!!!_ But eventually, even that exciting revelation palled, especially when he discovered he couldn’t leave the wood. 

It wasn’t anything obvious; wasn’t like he would watch the trees move. But if he kept going forward long enough, he always, always came back to the center. 

After a while it wasn’t so much of a hardship. He would sit down at the base of a tree and lean back, and in the soulscape there were no ants to crawl over his shoulder when he did so. The trees roots would be on either side of him like the arms of a favorite chair, and he could sit and watch the clouds scudding across the blue sky—always blue, much bluer than in real life—far above him. 

It was beautiful and peaceful. Bucky had said he had a castle—“Only you, Bucky, _honestly!”—_ and that was probably fine for him, but this was so much more tranquil _._

A castle just sounded empty to Steve. You would need people to fill it, and as lovely as his soulscape was, Steve already knew that he wasn’t going to get a soulmate to go in it. Heck, he’d be lucky if he even lived that long! 

 

* * *

_2012_

* * *

 

He’d been awake for two weeks, and he couldn’t fall asleep.

He hadn’t been awake for the _entire_ two weeks; there were nights when he had gotten a good three, or once even four hours. But _staying_ asleep...

It was snowing there, in his soulscape. The one time he slept deeply enough to make it there, he saw it—felt it—and instantly woke up again, shouting at the ceiling in horror. And since then...

He had slept deep enough to hit the scape again tonight, only the second time since he... since he had... well, _since._ He had lasted a whole two minutes tonight, striding out of the fairy ring and into the clearing before realizing his feet were cold, his trouser bottoms soaked through. 

He had gone to the gym instead of trying to sleep after that. 

Maybe a few dozen rounds with the punching bag would help warm him up.

 

* * *

**SAM**

* * *

 

There were footprints in the clearing. Small, narrow, a short stride: probably a woman. Sam had been in this part of the soulscape for years, now, and he had passed this clearing hundreds of times; how had he missed her?

Then again... He remembered the soul-crushing grief of losing Riley and found himself shaking in horror.  He kinda wished he were _still_ missing her. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t even _close_ to ready.

He fell to his knees in the snow, staring at the trampled trailsign in the eerie ring of mushrooms. 

“I can’t _do_ this.”

His voice failed to echo amid the dark vastness of the towering trees. It thudded instead, the sound curiously dampened by all the wetness and wood. "I can’t—please. I can’t do this again.” He swiped at his eyes unashamedly; if you couldn’t cry here, where could you? But the cold was making the tears burn and itch, freezing to his lashes uncomfortably. 

The sky above was dark with clouds, heavy, low-bellied things that leaked snowflakes like milk from swollen teats. The clouds didn’t care when Sam cried, and they didn’t care when he screamed, either. The profanities had no impact on them. All that happened was that when Sam woke up, he did so with twinned senses of shame and despair.

 

* * *

**STEVE**

* * *

 

Steve watched Loki and Thor vanish in a wash of vibrant blue with a taste like bile in his throat. That _fucking_ Tessaract... 

Banner and Stark peeled off in a car that had probably cost more than Steve had ever made in his life. Romanov bundled Barton into a dark-windowed SHIELD vehicle and tipped her chin to Steve as she sat down behind the wheel. Fury was already walking away in a swirl of black coat, and suddenly it was as if the whole team had never existed. 

Alone again. Steve swung a leg over his bike.

Arlington was two hundred and thirty miles away; should only take him about three hours. Bucky wasn’t buried there; Bucky wasn’t buried anywhere, at least not that Steve had ever heard. His body had been lost to the snow and the heights in spite of the teams that had apparently gone back later to retrieve him. So Arlington was as close as Steve was going to get. 

He laid flowers at the foot of the godawful monument, really wishing someone had warned him ahead of time that _he_ was memorialized here, too. He dropped one of the nice new scopes he’d lifted from the SHIELD armory and a bottle of the worst whiskey he could find. Even that wasn’t half as bad as the swill they had drunk after prohibition let up; back when it was first repealed, nothing had had time to age before they were all trying to swallow it down, and _god,_ the tricks folks pulled to try to get swill to taste like it once had...

He stood there like a chump for a minute, then realized how dumb he was being. He glanced around—no one—and climbed up on the base of the ridiculous statue, instead. The base was large and square, the toe of the ridiculous pixie boots his sculptural self was wearing hitting at the level of his hip when he was standing in front of it. Seated on it, his legs swung easily above the ground like a child’s. Back when he had been small, every chair had been too big; his feet had never reached the ground. Now, his heels hit the embossed plaque just at the level of his own name, striking over and over again on the year of his supposed death. Seemed fitting, somehow.

He tried to figure out what he wanted to say to Buck, now that he finally had the chance. "Sorry” seemed like a great place to start, but somehow he still couldn’t be. The war had needed winning, after all. Good men had died, and a lot more would have if Steve hadn’t stepped in. _Bucky_ would have died if Steve hadn’t stepped in. 

Bucky would have lived if Steve had stopped stepping after the first step, though. _That_ Steve could be sorry for. _You never did know when to back down,_ Bucky’s exasperated voice said in his mind, and Steve had to acknowledge the truth of it. He smiled wryly and kicked again. 

It was late afternoon by the time Steve had arrived at the grave, and the light was slowly toppling sideways. He hadn’t quite worked the visit out of his system by the time the guards drove by in their fancy car, but he just pressed himself between his own marble legs and stayed very still, and the cops passed him right by. Shoddy, but he’d take it.

He stayed there as the sun set, as the ocean breezes died down, leaving the air heavy and brackish. Still sitting on his own cold stone grave, he finally—for the first time in weeks, or maybe decades—drifted into a sound, deep, natural sleep.

 

* * *

 

The snow and the faerie circle were waiting.

Steve squared his jaw and wrapped his arms around himself. He wasn’t letting the ice win. Not this time, at least. He had to triumph _once,_ didn’t he? 

The forest was just as cold as it had been, the light dimmer than Steve was used to, and above him the low-bellied clouds were almost blue. He had sat under the trees for hours just memorizing sunbeams, once upon a time; surely the storm couldn’t account for all the new darkness? Was the sun setting in his dreamscape? And if so, what did that mean?

The faerie circle was made of mushrooms, eerie, skinny things, gray as corpses. They weren’t a perfect circle; there were gaps, and then places where they grew thick. It was easy to step out without breaking any of them, even with Steve’s shorter legs.

He was back in his own form, here. It was especially bad with all the snow—he didn’t have the muscle to stay warm in all of this, and the ice cut right through him every time. He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering, then jerked his head up: he thought he had seen movement on the other side of the trees.

The clearing in which the fairy circle grew was large, maybe fifty feet across. The trees on the other side were thick-trunked and kingly heights, the ground beneath them relatively clear. It wasn’t a trail, per se, but it was easy enough to walk through. Still, one could only see so far into the trees, no matter how plain the ground underneath them. Steve crossed the clearing, picking his frozen-footed way through the snow, towards the movement. After all, what else could he do? There was no use just standing there in the deepest snow around, and he wasn’t exactly inclined towards running away. 

He had maybe twenty feet to go before the treeline when he caught sight of the movement again, and this time his breath caught painfully in his throat. 

That was definitely a man.

Steve stopped, bending over at the waist, bracing his hands on his skinny legs. He was breathing hard as if he’d been sprinting, but even with his breath fogging the air, there was no doubting it. There was someone in the woods. _There was someone in his soulscape!_

Steve had prayed for this every damned day of his life until he had gone down. He had hoped and dreamed, even when it seemed like he couldn’t possibly have a soulmate, because he would’ve met them already, wouldn’t he? Except—ha—his soulmate must be a modern man. His soulmate wouldn’t have been born until after Steve had died, and that realization sucker-punched him so hard he almost fainted. 

When Steve had been a child, it had been normal to not have a soulmate in your scape; after all, the ability to reach the scape came with age, so your soulmate was just assumed to be too young still. But then he had been thirteen, and then eighteen, and then twenty, and still no soulmate. Steve was one of the unlucky ones—not so rare, really; three in ten—who had a scape but no mate, and that had been so _lonely._ Always he had been lonely; all he’d ever had was Bucky, and Bucky had been alone just the same way he was.

And now there was a man in Steve’s soulscape.

“HEY!” Steve called out, feeling young and dumb and awkward as he did it. "Hey, who’s there?!”

A tall, strong-looking black man peered around a tree. He was too far away for Steve to really see his face, but even the vague outline of him was enough to send Steve’s heart pounding in his chest—or it would have been, if Steve’s heart weren’t _already_ careening around in his rib cage at fifty miles an hour. 

The man—Steve’s _soulmate,_ Steve realized all over again in wonder—watched him for a second, and then—

“Oh, _hell_ no!”

—he turned and bolted.

Steve stood there for half a second, jaw hanging open like an idiot. 

But—

That wasn’t—

He wasn’t supposed to—

“You _can’t!”_ Steve blurted.

He gave chase.

It was, by far, the _stupidest_ chase of Steve’s life—and Steve had once chased a HYDRA barge using _another HYDRA barge,_ both ships lumbering across an overcrowded bay in Denmark at all of about ten knots. This chase, even on foot, was faster. This chase was faster even on Steve’s _original_ feet. 

But as ridiculous as the Great Barge Marathon of 1944 had been, this was even worse. 

For one thing, Steve kept having to stop. His didn’t have pneumonia anymore, but his original form was pretty horribly out of shape, and the cold burned through his lungs in a way that had not actually gotten less terrifying over the years. The upshot was, he kept stopping to bend over and wheeze every fifty yards. That would have given him a disadvantage, except that his soulmate was wearing sandals and kept slipping and mincing in the freezing snow that covered everything in a thin layer. 

Added to that, the soulscape pretty obviously _wanted_ them to come together. So Steve would fall behind, catch his breath, and charge forward again, only to come around the curve to find his soulmate knocked on his ass, staring in betrayal at a tree trunk which had not previously been blocking the path. And then his soulmate would see him, and scramble to his feet, and off they would go again. 

Steve hadn’t managed to catch the other man by the time he woke up.

It was almost too bitter a pill to swallow. He’d been alone for so _long—_ and now his soulmate wanted nothing to do with him, wanted _so little_ to do with him, in fact, that he was willing to run his ass off through a slippery, snow-dusted forest trying to escape. 

Was Steve really that bad, that just the thought of _meeting_ him was enough to run away from? 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Brenn for spotting an editing fail last chapter. :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the weekly updates for a while. Next update is two weeks from now; probably it'll be every two weeks after that, alternating with Told You Dirty Jokes updates, but there's some dependence on editing and also real-life work situations. :)

~~NATASHA~~

NAT

* * *

  

Nat spent the first year after Coulson’s death keeping Clint from dying. She didn’t have time to worry about her soulmate—who was locked away from her, anyway—or even the success of the Avenger’s initiative, which had foundered almost as soon as it was begun. They weren’t a team if they were scattered to the four winds, but then, they weren’t a team if one of them killed himself, either. 

It didn’t have to be direct. Bereavement leave was only a month; they both got called up for missions. But Fury was sensible, and only ever called them up together. If he hadn’t... Nat had seen the way Clint looked at the arrows in his hands, at the jumps he could _probably_ make. She stuck close to his side. Nothing came of it.

After Manhattan—after the Chitauri—she carried Clint back to the farm, and told Laura what had happened. She helped watch Lila and Cooper—terrifying—while Clint made his way back to caring about anything other than the pain. 

It was only when she thought he was safe—six months later, sitting on the porch swing with Laura watching him teach Lila how to throw an ax—that she was willing to ask aloud.

“Do you think he knew?”

Laura didn’t look over, didn’t even stop the swing of the chaise. “Who?”

“Coulson,” Nat answered, and _now_ Laura looked over, her gaze sharp, her expression forbidding. “If Clint hadn’t had you,” Nat explained, gesturing around the farm. “If he hadn’t had the kids, or anything to come back for...”

Laura kicked the swing into motion again, turning her attention back to the scene in the yard. Below, Clint let Lila throw the hand-axes they were practicing with. There were three of them, and Nat knew who was throwing by the sound: Clint was _thud thud thud,_ Lila was  _thud, thud.... thud._ “He’d have come through it. Besides, he still has you, doesn’t he?”

“I’m not the same.” Nat tried to keep any bitterness out of her answer. It wasn’t Clint’s fault, after all.

“You matter,” Laura disagreed. She reached out and took Nat’s hand.

Natasha looked at their fingers, tangled together. Her heart was pounding, too fast. Laura wasn’t hitting on her; she could have maybe understood that. This was something... else. Panic rose in her throat, but she didn’t let go. It was nice to have her hand held, even if it was confusing. 

“But no,” Laura was saying, “even without me. Even without _you._ He still would have come through.”

Nat wasn’t sure. She thought back to those long months of hauling Clint away from the cliffs. 

She really wasn’t sure.

Laura read her silence correctly and explained, still not looking away from the ax shenanigans in the yard: “He wouldn’t do that to Coulson.”

Nat felt it like a stab. She opened her mouth to make the obvious argument— _Coulson’s dead, Laura—_ and then the confession flipped around, smacking her in the face with a wet and slippery tail.

“He still sees him,” she said, checking anyway even though she knew, she _knew,_ that was what Laura had meant. Clint still saw Coulson in his dreamscape, which meant that Coulson _wasn’t dead._ Rage at the betrayal rose like vomit in her throat, and she forced herself not to look at Laura. The three little hand-axes were getting more and more consistent about how they thudded into the tree; she stayed focused on that. 

“You should talk to Fury,” Laura said. “Apparently, it was his idea.”

 

* * *

 

Nat flew back to DC and stalked into Fury’s office, talking about how _well_ Clint was doing and giving him every opportunity to come clean with her about Coulson. He looked her in the eye and lied to her, so she swanned right back out again, grabbed Captain America, and dragged him down to Myrtle Beach with her. She all but shoved him into a lounge chair and threw a piña colada at his face. 

He was suspiciously cooperative. He didn’t even ask questions until she was lying in her own chair beside him, drinking rum punch. He had a tablet on his lap, was wearing an oversized t-shirt and board shorts, and looked ridiculously good in spite of the band of white sunscreen on his nose. Meanwhile, she was lounging beside him in Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and an enormous straw hat, a black one-piece and extravagantly decorated flip-flops with flowers on the toes and sequins everywhere else. The one-piece was cut _high_ on her hip, and much more modestly up top. Between her legs and her shoes, _no one_ was looking at her face.

Cap sipped his piña colada, then wordlessly swapped it for her rum punch. She raised her eyebrows but let him. He propped his tablet carefully against his knee, then tucked his hands behind his head and relaxed into the chair.

After a second, he sat back up, stripped off his t-shirt, wadded it up and stuck it behind his head before relaxing again. (Down the beach, half the volleyball team stopped playing, and one of them was still staring when the ball hit him right in the head.)

“So,” Cap asked, “what are we doing here?”

Nat lolled her head around on her neck but didn’t look in his direction, the picture of the indolent sunbather. “Enjoy the beach,” she instructed. 

“I am! Look, I’m lounging! I just...” He sighed, scooching his butt a little further down in the chair. “...I wonder _why.”_

“You _said_ you weren’t on assignment,” she reminded him. “I _did_ check. So why not?”

Cap sighed. “Na- _tash-_ a. I’m with you. Whatever this is...” One beefy arm came out from behind his back, waving in the air, indicating the two of them. One of the surfers lost her balance and tumbled off her board into the water. “...I’m doing it. You’re my teammate; I trust you. I just want to know _why.”_

Nat sipped her piña colada, thinking about it. Not that he had “a right to know” or any of that nonsense—obviously—but... He _was_ her teammate, as he had just pointed out. He trusted her. And that might be _his_ problem, but it was also _hers,_ because...

...because he reminded her of Clint, in a way. 

She didn’t look at him, and she couldn’t give him any sign that he had gotten to her. But she _could_ give him some truth. “Fury lied to me. Gave me bad intel, then didn’t correct it. So I retaliating by stealing you to do _this_ with me—”

“‘This’ being ‘nothing?’”

“—which means he’s going to know I know. And he’ll be just inconvenienced enough to feel punished.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that pissing off—”

“Inconveniencing!”

“Fine.” She could almost _hear_ the eyeroll. “It didn’t occur to you that _inconveniencing_ the guy in charge of an organization that protects the entire  _world_ might be a bad idea?” 

Nat let her head roll on her neck. For all he was objecting to the plan, Cap didn’t look too upset about it. In fact... 

She had good peripheral vision; it was more than enough to see his lips twitch. 

“They can have us in the air on a QuinJet in half an hour,” she said, dismissing ninety-five percent of all possible objections with one sentence. “Shut up and enjoy your vacation, Cap.” 

It was the right answer: he calmed down, advancing something on his tablet before leaning back in his chair again. 

“Call me Steve,” he said.

Natasha didn’t respond. She recrossed her legs and sipped her drink, watching as a jogger ran straight into a lifeguard station. She smirked; that one had been hers.

 

* * *

 

Cap held his peace—alright, fine, _Steve_ held his peace—until much later that night, long after the cranky call from Fury explaining (in a voice that said he knew Steve already knew) that if he wanted to take a vacation, he was supposed to request time off _before_ leaving. 

“Sorry,” Steve said insincerely, smiling blankly up at the ceiling. “Hey, did you want to talk to Natasha?”

Fury had not wanted to talk to Natasha.

After that, they had gone for a walk on the boardwalk, both of them in shades bigger than their heads, Nat still in her bathing suit—it hadn’t gotten wet—and a sarong skirt, him in a new pair of board shorts (his _had_ gotten wet) and a hideously patterned Hawaiian shirt that Natasha had picked out for him herself. Or maybe Nat had done that one; the boundaries were blurring. 

They had eaten their weight in unhealthy things: fried dough of every variety and half a dozen forms of meat on sticks. Natasha always had some kind of frozen drink in her hand, but half of them were just juice and ice, especially once she caught Steve blushing when she called that kind “virgin.” Her free hand she wrapped around Steve’s arm; some time in their lounge on the beach she had decided what form her revenge would take. She kept ordering him drinks, too, but although he drank all of them—and they were a lot stronger than hers—he didn’t seem to be feeling it too much.

There passed a high striker machine, all garish lights and bright paint exhorting them to _Try Your Strength!!!_ One brief glance’s worth of eye contact was enough to have Nat snorting in laughter. Steve caught her humor, and pulled an _incredibly_ bad innocent expression as he went to ask the barker for a try with the mallet. A minute later, the barker was staring at the back of the machine in puzzlement, and Natasha was the proud owner of a four-foot-tall stuffed snake. 

She nudged Steve until he turned back towards the hotel. 

They were sharing a room, because this was a whim, and therefore she hadn’t made arrangements in advance. When Steve had heard the room prices his eyebrows had hit his hairline and he’d all but squeaked _“How much?!”_ so she had rolled her eyes and blown him off with, “We’ll share, then,” before getting a double. She figured she could always go into the bathroom to change. 

By the time they got back in the evening, though, she wasn’t inclined to go into the bathroom to change. 

“Maybe I’ll straighten my hair,” she mused, staring in the big mirror over the dresser. It was a nice room; the furniture was all veneers, but good veneers, and the lightbulbs all had decent wattage. There was the dresser, the mirror, twin nightstands, a television, a little table that wanted you to believe it was a desk, and two rolling chairs to sit at it with. There was no balcony, and the windows looked out over the sea. 

“Why?” Steve asked from the bed further from the door. He was sprawled on his back, his foot kicked over a knee. The Hawaiian shirt was unbuttoned, hanging open over his chest. He’d pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and forgotten about them. 

Natasha watched him evenly in the mirror. “Something different,” she shrugged. “What do you think?”

He cranked up on an elbow and stared at her, then shrugged, looking baffled. “It’s your hair.” He lifted his elbow up and bounced back to the bed again, staring at the ceiling as if lost in thought.

The air conditioning turned on with a click, the ceiling vent blowing cold air straight down her back. Steve had half sat up when it came on, she noticed. He looked nervous for a second before reclining once more.

She straightened up and crossed to the side of the bed, kneeling on it, throwing a leg over his stomach. He blinked up at her. She would have thought he was totally indifferent to her presence, except that his eyes did dip down to her neck once, lingering on her cleavage before snapping back up to her face. His ears went red, but he didn’t slip up again.

“Do you want to sleep with me?” she asked.

His eyes narrowed, and finally, _finally_ he asked, “What was Fury lying about?”

She made a face and sat back, pretending to ignore that she had dropped her ass right onto his junk. Fury must have assumed she had already told the team, anyway; if not, he would have told her himself, before instructing her to keep silent. “He told us Coulson was dead.” 

Steve froze beneath her, which was more of a reaction than the invitation to sex had gotten. “Coulson’s _not_ dead?”

“Apparently not.” Natasha smiled, an alternative to baring her teeth. Steve's ankle was still up on his knee, which made a nice backrest. 

“Wow.” Steve looked _pissed,_ she noted gleefully. Nice to know she wasn’t the only one Fury had kept in the dark. “Now I almost _do_ want to have sex with you, just to tick him off.”

She laughed in surprise and leaned forward, pressing herself against him. “I’m offering.”

“Natasha.” He put a hand up to stop her, then obviously couldn’t figure out where to put it: her chest was dangerous territory, her neck as a different kind of dangerous, her face too close to his to get a hand in between them. “No. I mean, it’s nice—it’s very, uh, flattering—and you’re... _wow—_ but, no. I’m sorry, I can’t, I—it’s not you.”

“No harm done.” She didn’t move, though. She was already this close to him, and besides, he might change his mind. He wasn’t indifferent, that was for sure: he wasn’t actually hard yet, but she could feel him chubbing up, at least a little. “You’re not seeing anybody.” 

She wasn’t quite asking, because she was sure of the answer, but he was able to read the question in it, anyway. “I have a soulmate,” he explained apologetically. “Not—I haven’t met, uh. We haven’t met yet. But hhh... I think—I mean, back when I thought I didn’t have one, that was one thing, you know? But now I do, and that’s—so I can’t, because.” He shrugged, not looking at her. _“You_ know.”

“Not really.” She toyed with one of the buttons of that hideous shirt. She couldn’t quite tell him that she had a soulmate, not when she hadn’t even told Fury. She struggled for something else to give him. “I’ve never understood the idea of... of saving yourself for your soulmate.” That was true enough. “We are who we are. And if we have a life before we meet them...” She tried to imagine this even being a discussion when she and the Soldier met. She couldn’t. He’d been an adult when she was seven, so he must have had a life before, right? And besides which—he’d _shot_ her. That was a little bit more important than who had had how much sex.

Steve lifted a hand and covered the one she was still plucking at his shirt with. “I’ll wait,” he said firmly. He didn’t make any move to throw her off, though, and she took comfort in that. 

She smiled up at him, and decided to make something easier for him. Out of... call it gratitude. “Are you gay?” 

He blushed, a charming pink that started in his cheeks and spread to his ears. “No? No, I mean... I like—women...” His eyes darted to her cleavage again as if drawn. He had to give a little cough and shake his head to pull them away. “I like both. I mean, my soulmate... is... a...” He broke off, swallowing nervously. It was obvious he’d never said this sentence before. He nodded to himself—internal peptalk, she thought, amused—and tried again. “My soulmate is a man.”

He paused for a second after saying it, and when she didn’t tell him he was a deviant and no heavenly warrior appeared with a flaming sword to strike him down, he went on. “He’s a man, but... I like you, too. You’re—you really _are—_ well, I like you just fine. If it weren’t for—well...” 

He swallowed, a gulping, convulsive movement, and she just waited, giving him the space to say it his way. After a second he must have figured out she wasn’t upset, because all the tension leaked out of his shoulders and he smiled sweetly. “I’d say yes to you in a heartbeat if I thought it was fair to him, Natasha.”

She pushed up on her hands, inching her face up until she could kiss his cheek. “Thanks,” she whispered in his ear. 

When she pulled back, he was red all over, but also grinning crookedly, a wicked sense of humor coming through. “As it is, I’d need a better reason than just to piss off Fury.”

She rolled her eyes and swung her leg back over, lying on her back, squished into his side. He curled his arm around her to hold her in place. 

“Inconvenience,” she corrected. 

“Yeah, I want to be spared that, too.”

She swallowed and let just a little of the pain out, sure now that he wouldn’t strike at it. “Coulson is _alive,_ Steve.”

“Well, good. It’s not like the rest of you are any good at writing letters.”

 

* * *

 

After that, they spent a lot more time together. She got slung onto the STRIKE team with him, which helped: he was more relaxed around her, and she had an easier time working with a team full of macho jerks when the guy in charge _wasn’t_ a macho jerk. 

STRIKE tried to troll her by taking her to a bar and getting her drunk. She trolled them right back by going along with it. Rumlow matched her shot for shot, until finally they threw back their shots and the motion made him slide right under the table. Steve laughed until he had the hiccups.

After that, she trolled them all again by taking them out to the cheesiest bar she could find: poker themed, in the touristy part of town. There she _did_ get drunk, because Steve was looking extra handsome and had absolutely not noticed the cute femme bartender flirting with both of them. Natasha went back for a few extra drinks before asking for her number, then tripped and fell, only for Steve to catch her. The bartender looked like she’d suddenly caught a clue—a clue about _what?—_ and stopped talking to Nat after that, which was a damned shame. 

At that point, Nat’s pride demanded that she wait for the STRIKE team to file out before she could stand and work her way towards the door. Steve casually waited with her, then helped her home.

She steered him towards the apartment SHIELD had furnished her, and he carried her in a fireman’s lift the last quarter of the way. When he tossed her down in her bed, she blinked up at him and started taking off her clothes.

“Wooah, there—hold on just a minute, Romanoff, and I’ll get out of your hair. Here, drink this.” He put a cup of water to her lips. 

She drank. She stroked a hand down his forearm, which was thick and muscular under her fingers. He had two of them, not that she was counting. She patted him with her fingertips as she pulled back, as if she were a gentle rain.

Steve’s breath caught in his throat. “Don’t do that.”

She blinked up at him, her face blank. “I’m not.” And she really wasn’t, either. Not _really._ She just... _wished,_ sometimes. There weren’t many men she wanted under her, because so often being over her was all they cared about. But Steve was different; the respect with him went down to the bone. Down to both of their bones... or something. “Your soulmate is a lucky man,” she said seriously.

Steve smiled bitterly. “Tell _him_ that, why don’t you. Come on, shoes off, gimme your feet.” 

She rocked back obediently so she could land her feet in his lap. He sucked in a fast breath. 

“Jesus, Natasha!”

...She probably should have kept her legs together during that move. They were splayed out, now, bent at the knees to make butterfly wings. Her hips had hitched up to make a flat line down the front of her body the way she’d been taught as a girl. She let her gaze wander away over his shoulder. “Just take the shoes off. And call me Nat.”

He pulled her shoes off and tossed them towards the pile in the closet. While he was turned away, she arched up and started rolling down her hose. By the time she had let her hips fall, he was looking back at her, a blend of exasperation and... something else... in his expression. Something _familiar,_ what was it...? 

Oh. Bluff calling. He was taking that as a dare.

“Don’t get excited,” she snorted. “There _is_ no good way to take off a pair of nylons.”

He relaxed and patted her ankle before getting off the bed. “I can’t argue. I went through about sixteen pairs before they gave up and requisitioned me some silk ones.” 

She curled over laughing, watching as he picked up the shirt she’d tossed over her vanity and threw it in the hamper. He went into her bathroom, came out with aspirin, and kissed her forehead. She told him goodnight, but it might have come out in Russian. She was almost asleep by now.

He paused at the doorway, turning back while reaching for the light switch.

“Good night, Nat.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Other fic isn't back from the beta yet, and I really wanted to get something posted today, so here's this. Probably three weeks before the next one, but still, this should help. :)

* * *

**SAM**

* * *

 

 

Sam woke up and thanked God it was a Saturday. He immediately picked up his phone and started dialing. 

“Mmmello?” 

“I need a drink.”

There was a pause, during which fabric rustled. Sam could picture his sister leaning upright in her bed, squinting at the far wall. He grinned to himself, because squinting wasn’t going to do her any good: her glasses would be next to her alarm clock, same as they had been every night for the last twenty years, and both clock and glasses and would be on the dresser, too far from the bed for her to hit snooze without getting up. 

Two thumps. She was getting out of bed. 

“...Sam, it’s seven in the morning!”

“It’ll be ten by the time I hit New York,” Sam pointed out. "You gonna meet me at Mama Gina’s, or not?”

“If I say no, will you skip the booze and  _ talk to someone,  _ like a reasonable human being?”

“Hell, no! I  _ will  _ pick a bar that’s a hell of a lot closer, though.”

Shelby groaned, the best possible big sister. "Make it twelve-thirty instead,” she told him, “Star has a soccer game.”

It was closer to one, but she did eventually slide into the long low seat of the booth across from him. She smelled good, like cut grass and oranges. 

“Star win?” Sam asked. He pushed a basket of fried pickles towards her in silent invitation. 

“Devastation—three to nothing. Gimme your water.” She drank deep, and Sam saw the approaching waitress pause to grab a water pitcher on her way towards them. "Ugh! God, I needed that. Okay—hello! Yes please, just water, thank you. Oh, and also a strawberry daiquiri—bacardi, no whipped cream. Can I get some extra strawberries on that? And a basket of fries, loaded fries, no chives, please. And some ranch.” 

Shelby folded the menu with her typical efficiency and handed it to the waitress with a smile that said  _ go away. _

The waitress went.

“Her name is Ginny,” Sam said. "In case you wondered.”

“Stop giving me shit and tell me why you came all the way up to New York to get your day-drink on.”

Sam clenched his jaw and waited while Ginny dropped off a second water. When she was gone, he said, “I have a second soulmate.”

“Oh,” said Shelby. Her brow furrowed and she sat back, processing. "Okay... Sounds like a good thing. And that’s causing you to drink because...?”

Sam looked at her, knowing he was as wild-eyed as he felt and not caring too much about that. "Wouldn’t you be drinking, if it was you? Imagine Michael’s dead, and you’ve been living your life, trying to get used to being all alone in your dreams and then one day you’re _not?”_

Shelby frowned, obviously thinking it over. "So you’re weirded out? Or is it something else?” She made a show of pulling extra paper napkins from the holder and sprinkling salt on them.

“Hell yeah, I’m weirded out! And—shit.” Sam fished one of the lemons out of his drink and ate it out of the rind. She reached out to take the other one and he jerked the drink back against his chest, scowling at her. 

She scowled right back, much more scary than he was, the way she’d always been. “So why didn’t you know you have a second one until now? How young  _ is  _ this guy? Wait, guy? Girl? Something in the middle? Thank you.” She looked up at Ginny with a smile for both drink—strawberries everywhere—and fries—an entire basket of them, loaded with cheese and bacon, accompanied by two whole soup-cups of ranch. 

“Enjoy,” Ginny said, smiling back. Then she got the heck out. 

Ginny was no dummy.

Shelby turned back to Sam.

“Guy, as far as I know,” Sam admitted. He smiled thinly as he stole some of Shelby’s fries. "Skinny guy. Blond.”

“So you have a thing for blonds,” Shelby snorted. Unlike their parents, she had actually _met_ Riley, and she’d liked him a lot, too. They had given each other about three mountains of shit, but by the end of the first weekend, they’d been thick as thieves. She stuffed some of Sam’s pickles in her mouth and spoke around them. "By why didn’t you know before?” 

Sam didn’t answer. Shelby frowned at him. "Are you cradle robbing? That’s... skeevy, Sam. At your age?!”

“I—no. No, I’m not. I—lemme get another drink first.” Sam finished his Long Island and caught Ginny’s eye for another. They ate in companionable silence until it arrived, taking refuge in salt and crunch. 

When the drink arrived, Sam killed half of it in six quick swallows, then pushed the glass away and leaned back in the booth. "I ever tell you about my soulscape?”

Shelby snuck another pickle out of his basket and nodded. "When you first got it,” she remembered. "I think you came to me before you told Mom, even. A castle, right? You run around the ramparts? You said the views were amazing.”

“They were.” Sam dipped a fry in ranch and stared at it for a second before resting it back on his plate. "That’s where I was with Riley.”

Shelby didn’t say anything. 

“After he died...” Sam forced the words out. "...I, uh, fell.”

“Fell.” Shelby’s eyes had sharpened.

Sam grimaced. “I was being stupid,” he admitted, and when the rage kindled in Shelby’s eyes he realized how it sounded. "Shit. No, not that, I mean—I was  _ actually  _ being stupid, I  _ actually  _ fell, it wasn’t...” He leaned in and hissed. "I didn’t  _ jump,  _ Shelbs.”

Shelby relaxed into her booth again and sipped her drink, lips pursing around the straw. "Go on...” 

They worked their way through their drinks—first for her, third for him—and Sam told her about the grounds around his castle, about the forest that always cycled him back to that one clearing. And then about the snow, and hearing someone call out...

“It was just this skinny little white guy—real skinny, Shelbs, and real little; hell, I think  _ Star’s  _ got like two inches on him. Mousy hair, kind of wispy... And his clothes, those were weird. Old fashioned. I think he was wearing suspenders?”

“Well, historically, we show up to the soulscape in whatever’s most familiar or comfortable to us.” Shelby was using her doctor voice now. "Maybe he’s a hipster.”

“Maybe.” Sam poked the last of the congealing ranch and contemplated ordering more food. The burgers were phenomenal at Mama Gina’s, but you needed at least another fifteen napkins for the grease. 

“What’s his name?” Shelby poked at the last of her drink, using a fork to scoop the remaining berries out of the bottom. 

“Didn’t ask,” Sam admitted.

_ “Sam.” _

“Didn’t say anything,” Sam continued. "Just ran.”

“You  _ ran?  _ Sam, you asshole!” Shelby balled up the greasy napkin by her plate and threw it at him. "You just left this guy standing there?”

“He wasn’t standing there! He chased me!”

“Yes, because you are his  _ soulmate  _ and you were  _ running away,  _ you dumbass. Go  _ talk  _ to him!”

“I can’t.” Sam flexed his fingers, stretching them out of the first they had formed. "I can’t do that. I’m not ready, and it’s not...” 

He didn’t have a way to end the sentence. He  _ wasn’t  _ ready, but there was so much more to it than that. Where had this guy been, for one thing? Sam had been wandering around his forest for years and never seen him. And he was much too old to be entering the soulscape for the first time. Had he, like Sam, come from the castle? What was his story? 

Sam couldn’t find a way to put the uneasiness of it all into words, though. Instead he ordered another round and a burger when Ginny came by again. (Shelby eyed their plates and frowned down at her stomach, but ordered one, too.)

“Don’t think you’re getting out of it that easy,” she said when Ginny had left again. "What’s your plan here, just not sleep?”

“Tried that before. Didn’t work.”

Shelby threw another napkin at him. 

He really didn’t have a plan, though. He couldn’t—could  _ not— _ stomach the thought of taking on yet another troublesome white boy who would die and leave him all alone again. It wasn’t possible; he just couldn’t do it. But he couldn’t exactly _avoid_ it, could he? Shelbs was right, he had to sleep. And if you slept... Like the guy said: perchance to dream. So there was no way—unless the mystery twink vanished again as inexplicably as he’d shown up—no way to avoid him forever.

What was Sam gonna do, just keep running forever?

 

* * *

**STEVE**

* * *

 

Steve chased his soulmate for damn near two years before they finally met in person. 

Appropriately, he first saw him from behind. He would wonder later if he would even have recognized him from the front. 

He had been stationed in the capital for most of that time, working for SHIELD and running missions with STRIKE team Alpha. From time to time, Stark would drop by—seemingly just to needle Fury, although Steve hadn’t missed the real affection the Director showed towards Stark—and Steve saw Clint fairly often around the Triskelion. But mostly it was Natasha that Steve wound up working with. 

It was good work. They did a lot of work with the espionage community, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you saw in movies. It was less “torture the prisoner until he confesses” and more “our agent got kidnapped by a drug cartel, go rescue him.” They were more stabilizing the world than unsettling it, and that did a lot to help Steve sleep at night. 

Not that he was overly fond of his dreams. The snow had receded, but it had left a fog in its stead, a real pea-souper that coiled around Steve and cut through him nastily. It made it harder to spot his soulmate—or more specifically, his soulmate’s retreating back—but there were times when that was a blessing. Times when Steve would rather not have the reminder of how unwanted he was. 

He stayed active. Went out to visit Peggy, trailed the team when they went for after-work drinks. He shocked the team by admitting he liked Natasha’s choice of bars better than theirs: the guys liked sports bars, while Nat liked ugly, garish theme bars, the more hideous the better. But to Steve, sports just weren’t the same with the Dodgers in California—and the theme bars were usually hilarious. 

“They water the drinks here,” Hodges muttered, glaring at the designs on the table. The table was decorated to mimic a set of cards; the bar was  _ Alice in Wonderland  _ themed. 

“Doesn’t affect me,” Steve pointed out cheerfully. "They still taste great—oh!” 

The bar also apparently had a live Cheshire Cat to go with the white rabbit—patiently wearing a little miniature tophat—in the cage behind the counter. The cat was loose, and lounged decorously between bottles of spirits. When Steve noticed it, it blinked slowly at him and looked smug: perfectly in character.

So that was fun.

Other than that, Steve read a lot—nothing new there; he’d been reading a lot since the day he first learned—and drew very little. It was hard to find anything that inspired him these days. 

He went for a lot of runs.

* * *

 

 

The broad back and round hips ahead of him were familiar. For a moment, Steve couldn’t place them any more specifically than that: he’d seen them somewhere, that was all. Maybe on one of his previous runs; there were a few people he had seen over and over, and come to think of it, the sight of the tall Black man moving away from  _ did  _ evoke connotations of running...

O _ h! _

A berserk sort of effervescence swept over him, and he tripped, half running half falling for about six steps in a row before careening off the sidewalk and straight into a light pole. He staggered backwards, clutching his head, watching his soulmate run away from him yet again, staring after him, yearning:  _ if only...  _

Then he came to his senses and took off fast, not as fast as he could go but right up there. He had to catch his soulmate, talk to him, understand why he ran—

He had to  _ talk  _ to him. Oh, jeez. 

Maybe he should think about this for a second. 

He slowed to a jog—for him; he was still gaining on his soulmate—and tried to come up with what he was going to say. "Hello”? No, too bland. "Excuse me?” He couldn’t call his soulmate by name, even; he didn’t  _ know  _ his name. This was precisely what soulscapes existed to  _ prevent,  _ damn it. 

He was closing in on his soulmate, now, and he couldn’t run  _ slower,  _ that would be  _ worse.  _ He panicked.

“On your left!” he blurted, passing his soulmate completely. 

Then he put on some speed and ran the fuck away, feeling like a moron with every thudding step.

Of course, he couldn’t leave it there. A mile later he slowed, circling around the block in a self-recriminatory jog. What had he been  _ thinking?  _ The only things he knew about his soulmate now were his current physical location and that he liked to jog. 

_ And that he has a nice ass.  _

Accurate, but irrelevant.  Steve brushed the thought away.

He just had to catch up to him and find something to say. Hopefully something coherent and in English and not completely moronic. He couldn’t exactly claim that was a strong suit. 

He circled back around and came up behind his soulmate again, calling out the pass again, planning to jog just ahead of him long enough to make a conversation the reasonable next step. And then he heard it: “Uh huh, got it. On my left.” Voice dry as anything, but good humor lacing beneath it, and  _ oh _ .  _ Ohhh!  _

Steve suddenly knew  _ exactly  _ how to handle this. 

He grinned and sped up, ready to circle around again. 

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later, his soulmate was exhausted and collapsed beneath a tree, and Steve thought,  _ Well, that’s one way to get him to stay put.  _ They bantered for a minute; his soulmate was funny! “I assume you just took it.” Ha!

He got a name, too. Sam! Sam Wilson! That was such a great name. _Saaaam._ Steve worked really hard on not beaming. 

“It’s your bed, right?”

Steve had a heart attack, right there on the National Mall. “Wh-what? What’s that?” 

“Your bed. It’s too soft. When I was over there...” What was he  _ talking  _ about? The  _ bed was too soft?  _ No, actually, Steve couldn’t sleep because when he did, he had to watch his soulmate run away from him, and  _ why was Sam talking about his bed?  _ Didn’t he  _ know?  _

It was like standing in the middle of an open damned field, facing half a battalion of HYDRA shock troops, only to hear whistling descent of bombs dropping overhead. 

Sam  _ didn’t  _ know.

Sam Wilson, pararescue, VA, great ass and two warm brown eyes Steve wanted to go swimming in,  _ Sam Wilson  _ did not know that  _ Steve Rogers  _ was his soulmate. 

Steve wrote down Marvin Gaye because he would have taken any excuse at all for another three seconds without having to look Sam in the eye.

What should he do? What  _ could  _ he do? 

_ Extraction imminent,  _ said his pager _.  _

Fuck!

“Any time you want to come by the VA, make me look awesome in front of the girls at the front desk there...” 

_ And what good’s that gonna do ya,  _ Steve wanted to ask. But Natasha was pulling up, and there was no  _ time. _

At least he knew where to find his soulmate now when he _ ran away again. _

 

* * *

**SAM**

* * *

 

 

Thing was, it wasn’t the battlements or anything, but the forest really was gorgeous in its own way. The leaves filtered the moonlight into beams, and the ground was fine as velvet under his feet. If it hadn’t been for the fact of his second soulmate—a second soulmate he was completely unprepared to face...

Sam sighed. 

He had met  _ Captain America  _ yesterday, and fact was, when you came face to face with the personification of American bravery, you pretty much had to do some soul-searching about yourself.

He really  _ was  _ doing better than he had been, after he lost Riley. He had been a wreck of a man, and he... wasn’t, now. He was human-shaped again, as one of the folks in his support group had said on Thursday. His grief didn’t just fit within the borders of his body, it fit within the borders of his heart. The rest of him was out there just living his life.

And if he could recover once...

It wasn’t fair, what he was doing. His soulmate—whoever he was, other than “the twinkiest twink ever to twinkle,” which Sam would not admit out loud under torture was how he privately thought of him—his soulmate deserved better. He deserved someone who would introduce themself, at least. Someone who would own up to the reasons they weren’t ready for a relationship. What Sam was doing was the soulmate equivalent of ghosting, and ghosting wasn’t cool even in  _ regular  _ dating.

The crack of a twig brought his attention up to where that soulmate was approaching through the trees.

Okay, but... He could buy himself a  _ minute,  _ couldn’t he? 

“Aww,  _ c’mon!” _

He really should turn around. 

He  _ needed  _ to turn around. 

Did he have any  _ intention  _ of turning around? 

No, he did not.

“You know there’s no point to running, don’t you? I already  _ caught  _ you!”

_ Excuse me?! _

Sam was so indignant he turned right around to face the soulmate he was still sure he couldn’t handle. "When!”

The tiny, skinny blond crossed his arms over his bantam chest and glared right back up at Sam. "Saturday morning?” he prompted. "On the Mall...?”

Sam hadn’t met this guy then, he’d met—

_ Wait...  _

Sam’s eyes bugged out and his mouth dropped open. " _ HOLY SHIT!”  _

Okay, Sam felt really dumb now. 

Although... He held up a hand behind himself beside his head, then slowly lowered it down by about a foot before raising his eyebrows.

Steve rolled his eyes. "Yes, I’m shorter now. I've always  _ been  _ shorter; it's the taller me that always takes _me_ by surprise.” 

...And, okay, if there had been  _ any  _ doubt in Sam's mind that the man in front of him was Captain America oh, that had been erased. Everything about the body language and facial expression that accompanied Steve's words was perfectly familiar, down to the exact angle of the head and the rise of the caterpillar-shaped eyebrows.

 “Holy shit,” Sam said again, much more softly. He let his eyes rove over Steve’s face and form, slowly, wonderingly. Aside from the size difference—although that was a  _ lot  _ to be setting aside—his hair looked lighter, now—picking up the silver from the moonlight—and his eyes looked bigger. Without about six thousand yards of shoulders on either side to add bulk, his neck and face both looked more delicate, and his nose, although actually the same size, seemed larger because everything else around them was smaller. The whole effect was oddly charming, and Sam found himself smiling without ever actually deciding to do so. 

Steve stood there in the snow and watched him take in all the changes, his eyes patient on Sam’s face. "I thought you weren’t interested in me without the serum,” he said, “but I’m getting the impression that’s not what it was.”

“That’s not what it was,” Sam agreed distractedly, starting to circle him to see from the back. 

“So why?” Steve had a little line between his eyebrows, an expression of pain that Sam wanted to smooth away. “Why did you run?”

Sam laughed bitterly, trying to think of the least painful, most succinct way he could say it. “You're not my first soulmate.”

Steve's face was changing as Sam came back around in front of him again, his expression going soft and aching. “Not your first soulmate,” he repeated. “Does that mean...? But... I've never seen anyone else...”

“Yeah,” Sam said shortly. “You won't.”

Steve's face showed the hurt of that sharp, curt fact. Sam took a moment to be glad that for him, the wound had scarred over a little bit. He still had to face it, every day, but there was  _ distance  _ there...

“Sam... Sam, I'm so sorry. Was it... Who was it? Someone you knew, or just...”  Steve waved a hand at the dreamscape.

“Yeah,” Sam said, “someone I knew.  Someone I served with.” He didn't want to talk about this. He tried to pull the subject back on course, circling back around to why he hadn’t said anything in the first place. “No offense against you—you're great. I'm sure you'd be great even if you  _ weren't  _ Cap, you know? But I can't do that anymore, man. This, I mean, I can’t do  _ this  _ anymore.” 

It hurt too goddamn much. 

But Steve’s smile was like the sun coming out. "I have good news for you, Sam. I’m pretty hard to kill.”

Above them, the snow had stopped, and a pale blue light was breaking through the low, heavy clouds. 

 

* * *

 

They ended up back in the clearing, sitting just clear of the fairy ring. Steve sat down beside Sam, then shifted position. 

Then he did it again. 

Around the sixth time Steve recrossed his legs, obviously trying to get comfortable on the hard ground, Sam snorted. "Man, c’mere.” He reached out and lifted Steve cautiously into his lap, turning him sideways so that he was settled across the meaty part of Sam’s thighs. Steve gasped, his breath coming quick, but didn’t shy away. Sam settled him in against his shoulder, turning them both sideways to prop against the tree that had been at Sam’s back. 

“This okay?” 

He meant it as a simple check in, making sure Steve wasn’t weirded out by touch or anything. Steve was Captain America—which meant he was  _ old.  _ Who knew what had been normal back in the day? But Steve’s eyelids dropped to half-mast, and he shivered when Sam’s breath pushed past his ear, and suddenly Sam realized that he was using his sexy voice, the one that used to do it for Riley  _ every single time.  _

Sam almost expected that thought to come with more pain. It had been years since Riley’s death, but while  _ every  _ thought of him didn’t stab into Sam’s chest, the majority of the memories still had little spurs on their heels. This one didn’t, though—whether luck of the draw, or because having a second soulmate actually helped, Sam couldn’t say.

Sam’s arm tightened around Steve. 

Steve’s lower lip trembled and his breath hitched, but he answered the question in his steady baritone, the voice that Sam was beginning to feel a little dumb for not recognizing. "This is fine.” 

He had his arm tucked behind Sam, but the tree behind them made it awkward. Steve had to let his arm fall lower to avoid scraping it against the bark, and that put his hand only an inch above Sam’s ass. Sam thought that in the future, he would probably not object to that, but this was their first time meeting as soulmates— _ really  _ as soulmates, with  _ both of them knowing about that, Steve— _ and it was too soon to be going that far. He thought about mentioning it, even resolved to put a stop to it when Steve tried to move it, but he never did. 

They talked.

Steve asked about Riley first, and Sam mentally gave him a few points for that. He was really interested, too. He got misty-eyed when Sam told him about the ramparts—“Sounds like all the best people I’ve known have had castles.”—and laughed out loud when Sam did his impression of Riley’s voice. Fair enough; Sam’s southern accent was flat terrible. 

Since they were somewhat on the topic, then, Sam tentatively asked about Bucky Barnes. Steve smiled sadly, a much less misty expression than it would have been on Cap. Sam kept the comparison purely mental: Cap had a lot of muscle around his neck and shoulders, and it changed the shape of his jaw, both literally and then, further, as an optical illusion. Little Steve, therefore, had a sharper, angrier look to him. His broken nose looked bigger, more noticeable, because his face was narrower. The sharp point of his chin wasn’t balanced by the squared-off jaw anymore, and because he was always looking up, it stuck out in front of him like the blade of an ax. When Cap had smiled sadly in the VA, it had looked heroic; when Little Steve did it, it looked pissed off.

Sam tried not to find that endearing and completely failed. Cap might be beefcake, but Little Steve was the one Sam wanted to eat with a spoon. 

Steve talked about his relationship with Barnes, a little. It didn’t sound much like the history books had made it sound. The history books had been half-convinced they were soulmates, for one thing. 

“Anybody ever just ask you?” 

Steve’s laugh was a warm pressure against the right side of Sam’s chest. "Only a couple. Not many; people didn’t in those days, not for two men.”

“They still don’t  _ these  _ days, in some places.” Sam thought about the five-word-long letter that had been the last thing Riley ever heard from his parents. He clenched his left fist. 

Steve nodded. "We lied about it, anyway. Told both of the men who did ask that we were.” He confessed this with a smile, a gleam of mischief like Sam remembered from the Mall. Sam smiled helplessly back. He was charmed. 

Steve was  _ very  _ charming, and no, thanks for asking, it was  _ not  _ fair.

Steve must have caught the expression on Sam’s face; he blushed and looked away, his gaze drifting across the clearing, looking at the brave yellow flowers poking their heads through the snow. His mouth was tucked up into a half-smile, a wry look. "Peggy asked, too,” he said, “and we told her the truth: neither of us had soulmates, we would probably die in the war... and then we both did.” 

“Damn,” Sam said softly. "Damn. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” Steve shifted, awkward in the face of sympathy, and his chin jutted out again as he looked up at Sam. "Can we get back to the part where we were about to make time?”

Sam felt the incredulous smile roll over him, as unstoppable as the rest of this. "Oh, is  _ that  _ where we were?”

“Pretty sure.” Steve wasn’t backing down even though his cheeks were red and he couldn’t quite look Sam in the eye. "You were eyein’ me like I was a prime cut of beef on a Sunday, so yeah, I think that’s where that was going.”

“Well...” Sam couldn’t help it, now. Steve wasn’t what he had expected; Steve wasn’t even what he had seemed, meeting Sam in person. Sam couldn’t put his finger on the difference, but he knew damn well it was working for him. 

He let his eyes drop to Steve’s mouth, signalling what he was about to do before he did it. 

“...If that’s where you say we are, I’m not gonna argue...”

He leaned in.

 

* * *

 

Sam had a moment, right after he dropped his hand to Steve’s thigh and Steve  _ squeaked, _ where he wondered what the hell he was doing. He hadn’t been ready for another soulmate. He had run away from Steve for two years now, and for good reason, too: he had been  _ destroyed  _ after Riley, a useless wreck of a man for almost a year and caged by his own pain for years after that. He hadn’t just lost his wings when Riley fell, he’d had them clipped, too. 

He still wasn’t happy, and he usually couldn't  do more than pay lip service to the things he knew he was supposed to feel. There had been a time in his life when he had flown through the sky, pinwheeling on a jetpack with a pair of wings while saving a man’s life with his soulmate at his side; how the hell was he supposed to be satisfied with anything else, after that? 

But there  _ were  _ times when counseling got close. When someone had a breakthrough, or when Sam got to play Patient Advocate and shout at idiots until they did the right thing. And now he  _ could  _ have a soulmate beside him again. He’d been so focused on the risk of that, he hadn’t seen how much joy it could bring. 

Steve was responsive, blossoming under Sam’s touches—legs spreading for the hand on his thigh, mouth dropping open for the hungry kisses Sam was giving him, whimpering for the bites Sam gave to his lower lip and jaw. He gave it up perfectly, instantly, like he’d never really been kissed before, and come to think of it, it was possible he never actually  _ had.  _

As soon as Sam realized that, he slowed down. "Lick all the cream out of you like you a twinkie,” he muttered, and Steve gurgled, eyes crossing. But there was no reason not to savor the meal. 

Sam moved his mouth to the little hollow in front of Steve’s ear, just before the bones of the face started, letting his lips linger on the smooth skin there. His nose nuzzled into the soft, fine hair. Steve was crying out even at that small, innocent touch. 

“Shhh...” Sam wanted to bite Steve’s earlobe and  _ really  _ get him to make noise, but he was starting to worry a little bit about the dreamscape. You got too excited in your scape, there was a good chance of you waking yourself up. Some people could do it—could Do It—in the dreamscape; he and Riley had Done It repeatedly. But there was no guarantee that  _ Steve  _ could, and the last thing Sam wanted was to wake out of this hard and alone.

“Your  _ mouth,”  _ Steve said in a tone that would be despairing if it weren’t so turned on.

Sam felt like an asshole for doing it, but it was absolutely worth it to move his hand an inch up Steve’s thigh and watch his new soulmate  _ yip.  _

“We should stop,” Sam said, moving his mouth that half-inch more so he could breathe the words hot over Steve’s ear.

Steve moaned in response, then blinked and asked “what?” is a voice so sex-stupid that Sam couldn’t help grinning proudly. 

“Stop,” he said, rubbing his thumb over Steve’s inner thigh. "We should slow down.”

Steve groaned. 

“Or we could do this in person,” Sam offered. 

Steve stiffened. "Pretty sure I won’t fit on your lap, then.”

Sam arched an eyebrow. "I have plenty of lap,” he said, laughing, sarcastic. He felt fierce, feral, ready to take on anything. "And you have  _ almost no  _ ass. We’ll be fine.” He brushed a kiss over Steve’s mouth, and then another slower, deeper one. Steve’s fingers were clutching at Sam’s bicep and they felt good, the whole thing felt good. 

Sam rested his forehead against Steve’s and took a moment to breathe. 

“Come see me,” he repeated. 

“Right,” Steve agreed. He looked dazed. "Yes. Where do you live?”

Sam rattled off his address and Steve beamed, then clutched Sam closer and wrestled himself upright. For the first time, he leaned in and kissed Sam, rather than being kissed. He was a good kisser himself, lots of playful, short kisses, the kind that had joined their lips thoroughly but immediately pulled back. Smooches, Sam thought, and had to fight off a laugh as the clearing flashed white in front of his eyes. 

They were still kissing a second later when the thunder rolled, big and booming as artillery shells and of course they both jumped apart at _that._ Steve might _look_ like a twenty-year-old twink, but he had the experience of a Captain and the trauma of a World War II vet, and Sam had better remember that. 

And then Sam got to feel extra dumb: as soon as he had realized that, he had to learn it all over again, because the thing that  _ really  _ triggered Steve’s flashbacks wasn’t the thunder, it was the sleet and freezing rain that poured out of the sky a second later. Sam took in the look on Steve’s face—naked fear, and he never wanted to see that again,  _ never— _ and hauled them both to their feet. "COME ON,” he shouted over the downpour. 

The woods were still thick and dark, and he couldn’t see Steve’s face at all with the clouds and the trees both blocking out the fragile moonlight, but he could hear him if he put his head down next to Steve’s mouth. Steve was breathing fast, but the kind that came with exertion, not panic. Sam calmed down a little.

Then he thought about the situation for more than half a second and felt his blood pressure rocket right back up again.

“Are you  _ sure  _ you don’t have another soulmate?” His teeth were gritted. One new soulmate was a challenge, although he was starting to feel up to it. Two, though... Two would be really too damn much. 

“I’ve been in this forest my entire life,” Steve answered. His hair was slicked flat to his head, and Sam could practically count his ribs through his shirt. “It’s a pretty big forest, but the only other person I’ve ever seen in here is you.”

“I was with you,” Sam reminded him, “and you were with me. And I’m pretty sure both of us were pretty far from upset. This—” 

He pointed up at the sky, at the weather, the impossible weather when it had been clearing up just half an hour ago. 

“This is what it looks like when another soulmate comes to the dreamscape, and they’re  _ upset as all hell.  _ This kind of change—” He shook his head, staring at the water and ice pounding into the delicate flowers of the clearing, just visible beyond the curve of the trees. He had actually researched this, after his soulscape changed so drastically. After the storm when Riley died, and again after the snow that—he knew now—had come when Steve was brought back to life. "Someone else has access to our scape,” he finished. "And man, they are  _ not  _ happy.”


End file.
